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THE YOUNG KING AND QUEEN " FELL ON THEIR KNEES, AND ASKED GOD 

TO HELP THEM." 



STORIES 



OF THE 



FRENCH REVOLUTION 



EDITED BY 

WALTER ^MONTGOMERY 



FULLY ILLUSTRATED 



"^'\^i,^ 



4/' 



BOSTON 
ESTES AND LAURIAT 

PUBLISHERS 



Copyright, 1893, 
By Estes and Lauriat. 



I THE LIBRAR-T 

|orcoNORE»»l 

IwAIHlMOTOr 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter Page 

31. The Old King Dies „ . . . . ir 

II. The States-General 14 

O III. The Tennis-Court Oath 20 

IV. The Fall of the Bastille 26 

V. The Burning of the Chateaux 33 

VI. The Fatal-" Banquet 40 

VII. The Insurrection of Women . . . • '. 45 

VIII. The National Oath , . . . 53 

IX. Troubles in the Army „ . 60 

X. The Death of Mirabeau 67 

XL The King's Flight 74 

XII. A Year after the King's Flight 81 

XIII. The Marseillese 88 

XIV. The Swiss Guard 95 

XV. The September Massacres 102 

XVI. The Enemy at Say . 109 

XVII. The Trial of King Louis XVI. 116 

XVIII. The Execution of the' 'King 123 

XIX. The Girondins 129 

XX. Charlotte Corday i35 

XXL Marie Antoinette 142 

XXII, Egalite Orleans - • i49 

XXIII. The Overthrow of Religion . . . . = 156 

XXIV. Arrest of Danton 162 

XXV. The Fall of Robespierre 169 

XXVI. The Day of the Sections 176 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Page 
The Young King and Queen "fell on their knees, and asked 

God to help them " Frontispiece 

Soldiers firing on the Mob 17 

The Tennis-Court Oath 23 

The Fall of the Bastille . 29 

Berthier seized by the Paris Mob 35 

The Fatal Banquet . . . '. 41 

The Insurrection of Women 47 

The National Oath : The Excavations 57 

" The determined officer sat on the touch-hole " 63 

The Death of Mirabeau 71 

Drouet comparing the Face on the Assignat with the Face under 

the Round Hat 'jy 

The Queen putting the Red Cap on her Little Son's Head . . 85 

Young Men enrolling their Names 91 

The Swiss Guard firing on the Marseillese 99 

M. de Sombreuil's Daughter pleading for her Father's Life . . 105 

The Wooden Horse on the Battlements of Thionville . . . . m 

"It is a pity to waste bread in time of dearth" 119 

The King's Farewell Meeting with his Family 125 



8 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Page 

The Girondins discovered in their Hiding-Place . . » . . . . 131 

Charlotte Corday 137 

Marie Antoinette being prepared for Execution , . 145 

The Duke of Orleans going to Execution . 153 

The Overthrow of Religion 159 

" Danton, no weakness ! " ,,,.... 165 

Robespierre trying to kill himself . . . » » . . 173 

Holding up the Head of Feraud on a Pike. ..,.„. .0 179 



STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 



STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE OLD KING DIES. 

ABOUT eight miles from Paris is the town of Versailles, which 
was but a poor little village when a great king took a fancy 
to it and built there a palace. His son was passionately fond of 
state and grandeur, and he resolved to add to the palace, room after 
room and gallery after gallery, until he had made it the most superb 
house in all the world. It is said the cost was so frightful that he 
never let any one know what the sum total amounted to, but threw 
the accounts into the fire. This was Louis XIV., called by French- 
men " Le grand Monarque." He reigned seventy-two years, having 
been a mere child 'when called to the throne. 

To this splendid palace and to an income of thirty millions a year, 
did his great-grandson, Louis XV., succeed. He, too, was a child of 
tender years when he entered on his vast inheritance. For a time the 
Duke of Orleans acted as regent ; but when the little king was four- 
teen years of age he assumed the sceptre, and in two years more he 
married a Polish princess. 

At one time Louis was very much beloved, and got the title of 
" Bien Aime; " but he afterward lost his people's affection, and by the 
time he died he was utterly despised, if not detested. Everything 
seemed to be going to rack and ruin. The French armies were 



12 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

defeated, their colonies fell into the hands of England, their navy 
suffered great losses, their commerce was all but ruined. Therefore 
the French people felt disgraced ; and many of them believed all these 
evils were greatly owing to the idleness and bad management of their 
pleasure-loving and careless king. 

At length, one year, — it was in the pleasant May-time, — Louis 
fell sick of small-pox. He was at once put to bed, and the doctors 
came to see him ; but from the first they looked with grave anxiety on 
the ailing man. His three daughters — whom he had nicknamed Rag, 
Snip, and Pig — waited on him dutifully, though the terrible disease 
turned everybody sick who came near the bed. The stench was 
carried far into the palace ; but there the princesses remained until 
the end came. They had a fourth sister, nicknamed Dud ; but she 
was in a nunnery, and so could not wait upon her dying father. 

So Louis, once the " Well Beloved," lay dying at last. Twice be- 
fore he had been near death. Once at Metz he was very, very ill, and 
prayers ascended in every church for his recovery ; and at another 
time he almost perished under the knife of an assassin, named 
Damiens, who leaped on the carriage-step and stabbed the king in 
the side. But now Death had come to him in earnest, and Louis was 
nevermore to smell the roses in the glorious gardens of Versailles; 
nor was he evermore to watch the wonderful fountains play, nor to 
hunt in the pleasant forest. Death had called for him at last, and he 
must go. When he felt himself sinking into the grave, he sent for 
the ' sacrament, and it was given him by Cardinal Roche Aymon. 
Many ministers of religion were praying incessantly in the chapel 
below for the king's recovery. While the dauphin (afterward Louis 
XVI.), his queen, and many of the courtiers were present at one of 
these services, the May skies were darkened by a sudden thunder- 
storm, and the rattling peals drowned the sound of the chants and 
prayers. The tempest rolled away, and soon after the old king 
breathed his last. 



THE OLD KING DIES. 



13 



While he was in his death agonies, the dauphin and his wife and 
others were standing ready to leave Versailles at a moment's notice. 
The horses were yoked to the carriages, and the postilions in their 
churn-boots were standing by ; all were ready for an instant start. 
At length the dauphin and Marie Antoinette heard a noise like the 
sound of distant thunder ; it came nearer and nearer, and very soon 
the door of the apartment flew open, and all the courtiers crowded in, 
each wishing to outstrip the other in saluting the new majesties of 
France. 

The young couple, it is said, fell on their knees and asked God to 
help them to rule, for they were so young and knew not how. It 
was a pious deed ; and we cannot but grieve as we see them, full of 
youth and hope and prosperity, beginning that course which so soon 
afterward ended in disaster and death. 

It seems strange to us that Louis did not remain at Versailles and 
follow his grandfather to the grave. Wicked as he was, the old king 
might at least have had a decent funeral. As for the young king, he 
and his brilliant court did not remain an hour, but stepped into their 
carriages and were driven away at a rapid rate to Choisy. Mean- 
while the dishonored body of the late monarch, now a mass of putre- 
fying sores, was tumbled hastily into a coffin of lead, which was well 
supplied wath spirits of wine. The coffin was then carried rapidly 
away by torchlight to St. Denis, where the kings of France had a 
burial-place. As the funeral procession passed through Paris, many 
were the bitter things said of him who was gone. The curious people 
stood in two rows to witness the dismal sight pass them at a quick 
trot. 

Ten years of peace followed the accession of Louis XVI. ; but he 
and his government had been meanwhile getting deeper and deeper 
into debt and discredit, and they w^ere at length obliged, by sheer- want 
of money, to call together a parliament, called the States-General, 
which had not met for upward of a hundred and fifty years. 



CHAPTER 11. 

* ' THE STATES-GENERAL. 

THE poor people in France were in a most miserable condition. 
Bread was very dear, and grievance of many kinds abounded. 
Once, not long after the young king ascended the throne, the poor 
rose up, and went with a petition to Versailles. The king appeared 
on a balcony, and spoke to them not unkindly ; but by the advice of 
his ministers, two of the leaders were hanged on a new gallows. 

The king by and by had to reduce the expenses of his household, 
and Versailles became an altered place. The wolf-hounds were given 
up; then the bear-hounds; then the falcons; and one nobleman after 
another, who had a good salary, was dismissed. 

A minister named Calonne, a clever man, did some service for a 
while in raising money, and so making the king's path easier; but it 
was all moonshine, as we say. Things were really getting worse. 
Calonne then proposed to do a very wise thing, we think ; namely, to 
^ call together the notables, — a thing which had not been done as long 
as the king could rule without them. These notables were peers, dig- 
nified churchmen, soldiers, lawyers, and men of mark, to the number 
of one hundred and thirty-seven, who sat in seven companies, each 
under a prince. Calonne was for taxing all, — even the upper classes, 
who stupidly thought they ought to be free. This was so little liked 
that Calonne had to resign and leave the country in haste. 

After nine weeks' chatter the notables departed each to his home, 
without having done much, except to pave the way for a National 
Assembly. 



THE STATES-GENERAL. 



15 



A clever Swiss banker, named Necker, had also labored, like 
Calonne, in the thorny path of managing the king's money-bags ; but 
as he, like Calonne, advised that the Clergy and Nobles should be 
taxed, he was dismissed, but called back again amid the plaudits of 
the people. Necker's portrait was carried aloft in a procession 
through the streets of Paris ; while a wicker figure of an archbishop 
who was very unpopular was burned on the Pont Neuf by a wild mob. 
A charge of cavalry was made, and many people killed and wounded. 

No States-General had met for one hundred and seventy-four years, 
and it was a hard matter to know how to o^et them to work toeether. 
But it was at last decided they should meet, to get France out of her 
troubles ; and so the king sent a signal through the land in the frosty 
January of 1789. Men were everywhere ordered to elect their mem- 
bers, and to draw up a list of their grievances. And of grievances there 
was no end. In the month of April the members elected were arriv- 
ing at Versailles, hunting up lodgings, and making preparations for the 
opening day. But before that day arrived, a terrible event had taken 
place in Paris, showing the violence of the people. A certain paper- 
manufacturer, named Reveillon, had his works in the most unruly part 
of Paris, named St. Antoine. Reveillon had been heard to say that 
a journeyman paper-maker might live well on fifteen sous a day. 
This seems to have roused the wrath of the rough inhabitants of St. 
Antoine, and they gathered with menacing looks about the manufac- 
tory. Reveillon sent for some soldiers, who cleared the street, and 
posted themselves therein for the night. 

But on the morrow matters grew worse, and so another detach- 
ment of troops was ordered to the spot. These men could hardly 
with gun and bayonet reach it, so choked with lumber and crowds 
was the street. The soldiers fired at the mob, who were already in 
the building engaged on the work of destruction, and the mob replied 
with yells and showers of stones and tiles. As the riot went on, some 
of the king's Swiss Guards, with two pieces of cannon, were sent ; and 



1 6 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

when the rioters saw the steady, determined faces of the redcoats 
and their hghted matches, they slank away into their dens, leaving no 
less than four or five hundred dead men in that one street. The 
unfortunate paper-maker, who had lost all but his life, took refuge in 
the Bastille, and the dead' were buried with the title of " Defenders of 
their Country." 

Twelve hundred and fourteen gentlemen were now assembled at 
Versailles, and each one kissed the king's hand in the palace. It was 
noticed, however, that while the Nobles and Clergy had both folding- 
doors thrown open for them, the members of the third estate, or Com- 
mons, had only one opened for them. A spacious hall had been 
prepared, the king taking great interest in its fitting up. There was 
room in it for six hundred Commoners in front, for three hundred 
Clergy on one side, and three hundred Nobles on the other. 

On Monday, May 4, the town of Versailles was a human sea. 
Men clustered thick about roofs and chimneys, and every window was 
thronged with sight-seers, all intent on the march of the twelve hun- 
dred deputies from the Church of St. Louis, where they assembled, to 
the Church of Our Lady, where they were to hear a sermon. The 
Commons walked in black ; the Nobles in embroidered velvet and 
plumes ; the Clergy in their proper robes. After them came the king 
and queen and royal household. Several men afterward famous 
were among the Commgns ; as Danton, Camille, Desmoulins, and Mira- 
beau. There, too, went the bilious Robespierre, spectacles on nose ; 
and there was Dr. Guillotin, who gave his name to the instrument of 
death. "With my machine," said he, " I whisk off your head in a 
moment, and you feel no pain." One clergyman, the Abbe Sieyes, 
sat among the Commons. 

Next day the States-General assembled in their noble hall, and the 
king made a speech to them. When he finished, he put on his hat. 
The Nobles followed suit, and put ontheir hats; and then the third 
estate, or Commons, did the same. Then arose a cry, " Hats off ! 




SOLDIERS FIRING ON THE MOB. 



THE STATES-GENERAL. 



19 



Hats off!" And some cried, " Hats on ! " The king, to put an end 
to a ridiculous dispute, took his own hat off again. This was but a 
slight thing, but it showed the temper of the Commons. 

For six whole weeks the Commons did nothing but wait. They saw 
the Nobles and Clergy wanted to sit and act separately, and they were 
resolved to do nothing at all, until they could all act together as one 
body in one chamber. This the king and court did all they could to 
prevent, fearing lest the weight of the Commons should incline the 
whole States-General to take the direction of liberty, equality, and 
fraternity, — things which the privileged classes always have hated 
and always will. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE TENNIS-COURT OATH. 

THE Commons, you remember, would not do anything at all, be- 
cause the Clergy and Nobles refused to sit and debate with 
them. The king and his council did not wish the Clergy and Nobles 
to sit and talk with the Commons, for they were afraid the Commons 
would make them too liberal ; and they were the more afraid because 
one hundred and forty-nine out of the six hundred Clergy joined the 
Commons. These were mostly clergy of the lower orders, and what 
we call parish priests. This made the court resolve to do something. 
Some were for planting cannon opposite the hall of debate, so as to 
terrify the Commons into obedience. Others were for shutting up the 
hall and turning them into the street. The king was always a mild 
man and against doing anything violently, and he did not approve of 
the cannon business at all. He was therefore persuaded to order the 
Marquis de Breze to shut the doors of the hall. 

On Saturday, June 20, therefore, when the hour of meeting came, 
the President of the Commons, whose name was Bailly, went, in com- 
pany with the members, to the hall. Bailly had received a letter from 
the marquis, which told him that the Commons would not be allowed 
to use the hall ; but this letter Bailly put in his pocket and did not 
notice. When he and the Commons reached the door, they found it 
guarded by soldiers, and within carpenters were at work, making the 
hall ready for some grand court ceremonial. The captain of the 
guard politely informed Bailly that he could not let the members in, 
and he showed the king's order. They might send some of their 



THE TENNIS-COURT OATH. 21 

number in, to remove any papers that might belong to them, but 
nothing more. So Bailly and his secretaries went in, and carried off 
the papers, with minds full of anger. The members stood some min- 
utes under the shade of a fine avenue of trees, considering what was 
best to be done. They felt sure that the courtiers were chuckling over 
their disappointment. The morning was cloudy, and a drizzling rain 
began to fall. Great was the hubbub of voices under the friendly 
shelter of the trees; loud were the complaints and cries of shame; 
many the plans of what to do next. Some were for meeting in a 
large courtyard called the Place of Arms ; others were for going over 
to Marly, whither it was heard the king had driven ; some were for 
forcing an entrance into Versailles Palace itself. But it was soon ru- 
mored that President Bailly had found a convenient place. It was a 
tennis-court in the street of St. Francis, and thither the disgusted 
Commons took their way. It was a bare place, enclosed by four 
naked walls. A table and chair were borrowed of a neighbor, and, 
the President and his friends having opened their papers, the proceed- 
ings began with a solemn oath ! A certain Monsieur Mailly proposed 
that the six hundred members should lift up their right hands to 
Heaven, and swear they would meet anywhere and under any and 
every circumstance, until they had made suitable laws for the right 
government of France. When the oath was sworn, each member 
took a pen and signed his name. There was only one man who re- 
fused, — a member from Languedoc ; and him they declared to be 
" wrong in his head." 

When the members had agreed to meet on the Monday following 
in the Recollets Church, they separated. Bailly had shown himself 
a worthy leader, and was at that hour the most popular man in 
France ; but the court party were dreadfully vexed. When Monday 
came, myriads of people flocked into Versailles to see what might 
turn up. The king, perhaps alarmed, put off his ceremonial ; and the 
Commons, in a solid body, marched to the church, where they found 



22 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

the one hundred and forty-nine Clergy awaiting them. There was a 
scene of much emotion, men embracing each other and shedding 
tears. The next day (a very rainy day) the king invited the States- 
General to enter the hall, where he made a speech. He declared his 
resolve that the three orders should vote separately. A number of 
articles were then read aloud, and the king said if they could, not 
agree upon them he would effect them himself. " Let each order," 
said he, " now depart, to meet to-morrow in its own place, to despatch 
business." Then all filed out, except the Commons and those Clergy 
who had joined them. 

It was now that Mirabeau showed himself as a leader of men. 
He rose to speak. While on his legs the Marquis de Breze interfered 
with, " Messieurs, you have heard the king's orders ! " 

" Yes," replied Mirabeau, " we have all heard what the king 
has been advised to say, but you are not the man to remind us of it. 
Go, sir, and tell those who sent you that we are here by the will 
of the people, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall drive us 
hence ! " 

It was not thought prudent to send soldiers to expel the audacious 
Commons; for they seemed inclined to show a mutinous spirit. A 
ruse was therefore tried. A posse of carpenters was sent into the hall 
to remove, with much hammering and noise, the platform. It was 
hoped their clatter would drown the orators, and stop the proceedings. 
But, lo ! the carpenters, when they had worked a few minutes, stood 
open-mouthed on the platform, listening with wonder to the finest 
speaker they had ever heard. Mirabeau was now moving that the 
Commons were a National Assembly, and that any person who dared 
lay a finger on any member should be guilty of a capital crime. This 
was put to the meeting, and made a decree. Before the week ;was out 
the rest of the Clergy and the Nobles had joined the Commons, the 
king begging them to oblige him by yielding to what was clearly the 
popular will. It was the last day of June when the States-General 




THE TENNIS-COURT OATH. 



THE TENNIS-COURT OATH. 25 

were united in one house ; and great was the joy and many the lighted 
torches carried about everywhere. 

But though the king had yielded to the Commons, he had done it 
very unwillingly; and he still hoped to punish his rebellious subjects 
by means of the sword, if he could do it in uo other way. Suspicion 
of his purpose was aroused by the marching of regiments and the 
rumbling of great guns. Cannon were pointed at the Assembly Hall, 
and the members were alarmed by the tramp of armed men and the 
never-ceasing tap of the drumstick on the drum. The general, 
named Broglie, had his headquarters in Versailles, and all the day 
long aides-de-camp were coming and going. Something was up, 
without a doubt, and some terrible damage would certainly have been 
done to the rebellious part of the States-General if it had not been for 
one fortunate thing, which was this, — the soldiers positively refused 
to draw trigger when their muskets were to be pointed at their 
brother Frenchmen ! They made a solemn promise to each other in 
the ranks that they would never act against the National Assembly. 
In fact, the privates in the French army, having nothing to lose and 
all to gain, were as eager for change as the citizens, and quite ready 
to disobey their lordly officers if the orders given did not please 
them. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE. 

A PICTURE of the Bastille, or State-prison, shows us a great 
mass of masonry, with round towers. It stood at the east end 
of Paris, in the street of St. Antoine. It was begun in 1369, and 
finished in 1383. Its strong walls were surrounded by a wide ditch, 
which itself was defended on its outer side by a wall thirty-six feet 
hieh. The towers had several eiQ:ht-sided rooms one over another, 
each with a narrow window. There was no fireplace, and no article 
of furniture, except an iron grating raised six inches from the floor, 
and on this the prisoner's bed was laid. The rooms in the walls 
were more comfortable. The interior consisted of two courts, called 
the " Great Court " and the " Court of the Well." The prison had a 
well-paid governor, several officers poorly paid, and a certain number 
of Invalides and Swiss, who had a small daily allowance, with firewood 
and candles. One unhappy prisoner was confined in these dreary 
walls for fifty-four 3^ears. Two prisoners, and only two, ever managed 
to escape. They contrived to make two ladders, which they hid under 
the floor; and one dark night they climbed up the chimney, cut 
through the iron gratings, and got on the roof. Thence they de- 
scended about one hundred feet to the bottom of the fosse or ditch. 
Then they made a hole in the wall next the Rue St. Antoine, and so 
escaped. This was Feb. 26, 1756. 

The month of July, 1789, had come. It was now Sunday, the 12th, 
and, owing to all those movements of troops we spoke of toward Paris 
and Versailles, the minds of all were in a flutter. Great placards on 



THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE. 27 

the walls urged you to keep indoors; but if you did not, you could 
hardly move without meeting a foreign soldier, " We are to be mown 
down, then, are we ? " asked one citizen of another. Had you been in 
Paris that Sunday, you might have seen Camille Desmoulins — poet, 
editor, and speaker — mount a table with a pistol in each hand, and 
ask the crowd around " whether they were willing to die like hunted 
hares. The hour is come," cried Camille, " and now it is eitiier death 
or deliverance forever. To arms ! " A thousand voices echoed the 
last words of Camille, " To arms ! " He then said, " My friends, we 
must have some sign to know each other by ; let us wear cockades of 
green : green is the color of hope ! " The multitude then rushed to 
embrace Camille ; and some one handed him a piece of green ribbon, 
which he pinned in his hat. Next, they went to an image shop, where 
they got two wax busts, — one of the favorite minister Necker, who 
had been just dismissed, and the other of the Duke of Orleans, a royal 
prince who hated the king, and became for a time on that account one 
of the leaders of the revolution. The multitude now kept moving on 
and growing in numbers. Armed with all sorts of weapons, they soon 
came into collision with the foreign troops, who, by order of Prince 
Lambesc, fired on them, and hacked at them with their sabres. The 
mob dispersed, but only to reunite in some other place. " To arms ! 
To arms !" resounded all over Paris. The bells were tolled at sun- 
set ; the shops of gunsmiths were broken open and rifled ; the blood 
of the great city rose to boiling heat that evening. Around the Hotel 
de Ville a raging multitude clamored for arms all night; but the 
authorities knew not what to do, and slipped away as best they could. 
A few daring spirits took their places, and sat up all night at the 
Hotel, giving such directions as they thought best, and ordered a 
Paris militia to be at once enrolled. 

Monday morning broke on the restless city. There was no work 
done in Paris that day, except by the smiths who were making pikes, 
and by the women who were sewing at cockades. These were not 



28 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

green, however, but red, white, and blue. All shops but those of the 
bakers and wine-sellers were closed. " Arms ! Arms I Give us arms ! " 

— such were the constant cries. About three hundred and sixty fire- 
locks belonging to the old city watch were served out. The Arsenal 
was broken open, but nothing was^found inside except rubbish. Two 
small Siamese cannon and some swords and armor were snatched from 
the king's- armory. Deserters from the regular army came trooping 
in. At two in the afternoon more than three thousand good soldiers 
left their officers and joined the mob. The newly ordered militia of 
Paris already numbered many tens of thousands, but arms were yet 
few. Fifty thousand pikes, however, were made in thirty-six hours ; 
so the smiths were busy enough. 

It oozed out that in the cellars of the Invalides Hotel there were 
twenty-eight thousand muskets. The governor there was an old man 
named Sombreuil, w^hom we shall hear of again. He, suspecting his 
old soldiers of siding too much with the rioters, ordered them to 
unscrew the muskets ; but they went to work very unwillingly, and 
in six hours had done very little. About nine o'clock on Tuesday 
morninof the Invalides Hotel was attacked and broken into, and the 
arms found, amid great rejoicing; and now, having got so many 
useful arms, the cry was raised, " To the Bastille ! To the Bastille ! " 

The governor's name was De Launay. He had eighty-two old 
Invalides in the Bastille, and thirty-two Swiss. His walls were nine 
feet thick, and he had cannon and powder ; but he had only one day's 
supply of food. About noon a man named Thuriot obtained admit- 
tance into the prison. He "found De Launay unwilling to surrender, 

— nay, he threatened to blow the prison into the air. Thuriot and 
De Launay went on the battlements, and the governor turned quite 
pale at the sight of Paris rolling onward against the doomed Bastille. 
But he would not yield ; he would die rather. A second and third 
deputation tried to move the governor ; but his patience waxing thin, 
he pulled up the drawbridge and ordered his men to fire on the 
people. 




'IHE FALL OF THE BASTILLE. 



THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE. 3 1 

And now began a dreadful scene. Men fell wounded or dying 
here and there ; shouts rose incessantly, mingled with ceaseless volleys 
of musketry. An old soldier, named Louis Tournay, was seen striking 
with his axe at the outf='r chain of the drawbridge : he was aided by 
another veteran, named Bonnemere ; and at length the chain was 
broken, and, the ponderous drawbridge fell thundering down into the 
ditch. 

Two officers chanced to be in Paris at the time, named Elie and 
Hulin. These men directed the troops, while a marine, just come 
from Brest, levelled the Siamese cannon against the walls. Men who 
were wounded were carried away, and those who were dying entreated 
the assailants not to cease fighting until the cursed prison was level 
with the ground. Three fresh deputations arrived from the Hotel de 
Ville, asking De Launay to surrender, and promising him favorable 
terms ; he, however, could not hear what was said, owing to the great 
noise, or, if he guessed what they said, did not believe them. And so 
the furious fight went on, from one o'clock, when it began, until five, 
when the Invalides made a white flag, and a port-hole was opened, as 
if some one would hold a parley. A man named Maillard advanced 
gingerly on a plank toward the port-hole, snatched a letter held out to 
him by a Swiss, and returned. It ran thus : " The Bastille shall be 
surrendered, if pardon is granted to all." The promise was given on 
the word of one of the officers, and the second drawbridge was lowered, 
and the mob rushed in. The Swiss stood grouped together in their 
white frocks ; and there too were the Invalides, all disarmed. The 
first comers, who had heard the bargain, meant to be true to their 
word ; but they could not, — for others, mad with vengeance, came up, 
and in a few moments one of the Swiss soldiers who tried to escape 
was killed, and an Invalide lost his right hand. The rest were marched 
off to the Town-hall to be tried for the crime of slaying citizens. De 
Launay, dressed in a gray frock with a poppy-colored ribbon, was 
about to stab himself, when some people interfered and bore him off, 



32 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

escorted by Hulin and Maillard, to the Hotel de Ville. On the way, 
however, the miserable De Launay was torn from the shelter of his 
escort, and brutally murdered. The only part of him that reached the 
Town-hall was " his bloody hair queue held up in a bloody hand." 
One or two others of the garrison were massacred ; the rest were 
saved, though with much difficulty, by the,, Gardes Francaises. Inside 
the hotel Elie was busy forming a list of the Bastille heroes. Outside 
was a perfect forest of spears and bayonets. Along the streets were 
carried the seven prisoners found in the Bastille, also seven heads on 
pikes, also the keys of the captured fortress. Through the whole of 
the following night the stones of which the prison had been built came 
down with a sound of thunder. 

And what of the king s palace } That very evening there was a 
grand ball in the Orangery. It was " Nero fiddling while Rome was 
burning," once more. In the dead of night the Duke of Liancourt 
came to the king's bedside and told him what the Paris mob had done. 

" Why, it is a revolt ! " said Louis. 

" It is more," replied the duke : " it is a revolution ! " 



CHAPTER V. 

THE BURNING OF THE CHATEAUX. 

LONG had the French laboring-classes been trodden down by 
the French Nobles. We have not the faintest idea now of 
the miserable bondage in which the poor people were held before 
the days of the Great Revolution. The fall of the Bastille seems to 
have aroused them like a clap of thunder. They rubbed their eyes 
as men awakened from a deep sleep, and asked whether it were 
real, or whether they were like those who dream. The wretched 
down-trodden slaves rose up with the bitter recollection in their 
hearts of ages of ill-usage, and with a keen relish for vengeance. 
Amply did they revenge themselves on the seigneurs, as the lords 
were called. These men generally idled their lives away in their ele- 
gant country-mansions or in the gay circles of Paris. They drew 
their means of enjoyment from rack-rented estates and from grievous 
dues ; and their tenants were ground down with penury and misery. 

One day, it is said, Louis XV., when hunting gayly as his custom 
was, met a ragged peasant with a coffin at the corner of some green 
alley in the wood of Senart. He stopped the man and asked him 
who was going to be buried in the coffin, and the man told him. 

" What did he die oi? " inquired the king. 

" Of hunger," replied the peasant. 

It is to be feared that was a very common disease in those evil 
days. Every now and then this bitter hunger drove the people to 
rebellion; and in 1775 they gathered in great crowds, as we have 
already heard, around the palace of Versailles, clamoring for bread. 

3 



34 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

The king showed himself on the balcony, and spoke soothing words 
to them ; but two of their number were hanged on a new gallows forty 
feet in height, and that was the answer they got, — an answer not 
soon forgotten. 

The old Marquis Mirabeau, in his Memoirs, has drawn a painful 
picture of the French peasantry. He describes them as " savages 
descending from the mountains," as "frightful men, or rather, fright- 
ful wild animals ; . . . their faces haggard, and covered with long 
greasy hair ; the upper part of the face pale, the lower part distorting 
itself into the attempt at a cruel laugh. You can fancy you may 
starve these people with impunity," said he, " always till the catas- 
trophe comes. Such government as this will end in the general 
overturn." And it did come when those " haggard wretches," as the 
marquis called thern, rose up against their superiors and drove them 
from their homes. 

Soon after the fall of the Bastille many of the highest in the land, 
afraid of losing their lives, hastily left the country, and some of them 
had much difficulty in escaping. Prince Conde was pursued to the 
Oise ; and others fled in disguise, with friends in lieu of servants on 
their coach-boxes. 

One immensely rich man named Foulon (whom the people hated 
with a deadly hatred because he had said they might eat grass) 
thought to escape them by pretending to be dead and buried ; but 
about a week after the fall of the Bastille he was found alive, and one 
morning early the villagers of Vitry, where he lived, dragged him to 
Paris. Bareheaded and decked with nettles and thistles, he was 
hurried to the Hotel de Ville to be judged. After some time a man 
stepped forward and said, " What is the use of judging this man ? Has 
he not been judged these thirty years ? " 

The yelling crowd applauded, and the old man was put to death 
without further loss of time. He was hanged to a lamp-iron, pleading 
for life, but in vain ; and after he was dead his body was dragged 




BERTHIER SEIZED BY THE PARIS MOB. 



THE BURNING OF THE CHATEAUX. 2il 

through the streets, and his head was carried about on a pike-point, 
the mouth filled with grass. 

His son-in-law named Berthier was also arrested and brought from 
Compiegne to Paris. He was a brave man, but his look became ashy 
when he met Foulon's head on a pike-point. Though Berthier was 
protected by a large body of men with drawn swords, the mob broke 
through them and snatched him out of his escort's hands. He seized 
hold of a musket and defended himself with the courage of a lion, but 
it was all in vain. He was hanged on the same lamp-iron, and his, 
head and his heart also flew over Paris. 

These two may serve as instances of the hatred of the people 
toward their rich oppressors. " These men were the tyrants of the 
poor," said their murderers ; " they drank the blood of the widow and 
of the orphan." 

A great stillness had fallen on Versailles. How, different it was 
now from what it had been a year or two ago ! The queen had become 
the most hated woman in France, and often shed many tears ; and the 
king must have felt his throne tottering beneath him. It was a fear- 
ful hour. Bread was dear, and grew dearer day by day. Money was 
very scarce, and the people's hearts were heavy and bitter. An English- 
man named Arthur Young has left a book behind him in which he tells 
of many things he saw in his travels through distracted France. He 
once overtook a poor woman who, though not yet twenty-eight, looked 
at least sixty years old. She told how hardly they had to live, she and 
her husband and seven children, and how poor they were after paying 
rents and quitrents, hens to one lord and sacks of oats to another. 
Besides these, and taxes to the king and other dues, the good man 
was obliged to do a certain amount of statute labor, for which he got 
no pay. It was no wonder that the poor woman said, " The dues and 
taxes crush us." 

And now, when the Bastille had fallen and the people had found 
out their strength, the work of destruction went on all over France. 



38 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Every night the darkness was dispelled by some great fire. The 
church bell of the village was rung, and the whole parish assembled 
to commit havoc as they chose. And they often chose to wreak their 
vengeance on the church itself ; for the clergy, as being a privileged 
class, were almost as much hated as the great lords. 

These great lords, with their delicate ladies and children, were 
obliged to fly, often by night, glad enough to escape with their lives. 
The tax-gatherers had to disappear, their occupation gone at least for 
a season. 

The same Arthur Young says : " The grand seigneurs were shocking 
bad landlords. They lived in the midst of ill-managed fields and 
wastes, and great woods filled with deer, wild boars, and wolves. If 
I were King of France for one day," said he, "I would make these 
great lords skip again ! " 

They did not combine, as they perhaps might have done, in their 
own defence ; but they were scattered widely over France, and were 
often jealous of each other, though no one doubts their courage. One 
man did indeed rid the earth of a number of his poorer neighbors by 
inviting them to a banquet at his chateau, and then killing them 
by igniting a barrel of gunpowder. 

Of course law was not yet utterly powerless to put down robbery 
and mob violence. Some of the house-burning ruffians were tried, 
condemned, and hanged on trees by the roadside as a terror to evil- 
doers. 

Such, then, were the scenes common in France in the summer 
months of 1 789. The wheels of industry ceased turning ; the soldiers 
seemed disposed to be mutinous ; and at Strasburg they openly em- 
braced the mob, and helped them set fire to the Town-hall. 

It was hardly safe, as Arthur Young found, to travel about France 
in those evil days. Many times shot and slugs came whistling about 
his ears, and sometimes his carriage was hit by them. Whether he 
was aimed at as an aristocrat flying the country, or whether the badly 



THE BURNING OF THE CHATEAUX. 39 

aiming peasants " shot at the pigeon and hit the crow," we are not told ; 
but he complains of the thing in his book. During this autumn the 
" first emigration," as it is called, went on without ceasing ; and many 
landed on the shores of Ens^land. 

Meanwhile hunger pressed heavily on the people, who had to stand 
in long queues, or tails, at the bakers' shops. This was done so that 
they who came first were first served, and the others in the order of 
their coming. A man would sometimes stand half a day in a queue, 
and then receive only a bit of dear bad bread. A rigid search was 
made all over the country for grain ; and farmers who would not sell, 
and bakers who adulterated their bread, were threatened with the 
halter. The bread at St. Denis was so bad and black that the people 
hanged the mayor for it. The corn-market at Paris had to be guarded 
by six hundred soldiers. Thus went on the French Revolution in the 
summer and autumn of 1789. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE FATAL BANQUET. 

TOWARD the end of September, 1789, the suspicions of the 
people of Paris became yet more aroused. The question was 
hotly debated, whether the king was or was not to have the power to 
" veto " — that is, to forbid — any particular law to be enacted. A cer- 
tain violent speaker, named Huruge, who went to petition against the 
king's having this power, was thrown into prison ; and General Lafay- 
ette and his soldiers had to be very strict in dispersing crowds and 
putting street-speakers to silence. Several newspaper printers and 
editors were seized, one of them being the well-known Marat, who was 
the most advanced republican, and who issued a paper called " The 
Friend of the People." These things did not please the multitude ; 
and moreover the scarcity of bread seemed to increase, and it was ob- 
served that the boat which brought grain from Corbeil paid only one 
visit to Paris instead of two every day. It was maddening to the 
mothers, who had children crying for bread in vain, to hear of grand 
dinners being given at Versailles. This was an aggravation of their 
own miserable state, and it led to what will be hereafter described as 
the Insurrection of Women. The grand dinners which went on at 
Versailles we will now attempt to describe. 

On the 23d of September, then, a dashing regiment, called that 
of Flanders, marched into the town of Versailles, trailing after them 
two pieces of cannon. Marat, before he was put in prison, went over 
to Versailles, and there saw evident signs of the king's doubling his 
guards and introducing foreign troops for the purpose of putting down 




THE FATAL BANQUET. 



THE FATAL BANQUET. 43 

the people by force. When the regiment of Flanders had settled 
itself in the barracks at Versailles, the Royal Body Guards thought it 
would be only right to invite the new-comers to a dinner ; and the date 
fixed for the repast was Thursday, the ist of October. But where 
were they to find a room large enough to dine in ? Among the 
stately buildings which made up the immense palace there was one 
very seldom used, — the Opera House ; and it occurred to some ingeni- 
ous man that this would be the very place for the grand banquet. 

The king readily granted the request, and in the Opera House 
the feast was held. • Now it happened that after the dinner was done, 
various toasts w^ere drunk ; and while the merriment was at its height 
the low-spirited queen was persuaded to enter the Opera House and 
look down on the brilliant scene. She therefore did so, with her little 
son in her arms and her husband by her side. 

There was a loud outburst of loyal feeling as the royal family 
walked round the dinner-tables ; and by design or chance the band 
struck up a tune which went to the words " O Richard ! O my king, 
the whole world is forsaking thee ! " 

The guests at once saw the fitness of the music to the circum- 
stances of the king, and they became greatly excited. They drew their 
swords and waved them about ; they tore off their tricolor cockades, 
trampled them under their feet, and replaced them by white ones (the 
old Bourbon color). 

This dinner was followed by other dinners on the 2d and 3d of 
October, when the white cockade was worn by all. These favors 
were made of a large size, as if to show a greater loyalty to the king 
and his family. Some wore black cockades, as if they were mourning 
for the king in his troubles ; and several had the courage to appear 
with them in the streets of Paris. The people felt insulted by these 
black badges ; and one national soldier at the Tuileries parade on 
Sunday morning, the 4th of October, started from the ranks, and 
wrenched a black cockade from some one who was wearing it, and trod 



44 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

it angrily in the dirt. Another man who wore a black cockade had 
it torn off; and when he attempted to replace it, a hundred sticks 
started up around him, and he was obliged to leave it where it was. 
Another nearly fell a victim to the lamp-iron, being saved from the 
rage of the people by the National Guards and General Lafayette. 

That same Sunday, the 4th of October, was a very disturbed day 
in Paris. Tidings of the banquets at Versailles were now being 
talked about all over the city, and thousands of hungry people were 
saying, " We are starving ; but yonder, at the king's palace, there is 
plenty and to spare." 

For the first time in the French Revolution there was seen, on the 
evening before, a woman engaged in public speaking. " My husband's 
tongue has been put to silence," said she, " but I will speak ; " and 
speak she did to a great crowd all the thoughts which filled her heav- 
ing bosom, and made it ready to break. 

A new idea seemed to strike the women of Paris that same night, 
and it was nursed all the next day. It was this, — to have a rising of 
their own. If General Lafayette and his men had silenced and put 
down their husbands, they would never be such dastards as to pierce 
women's hearts with their bayonets, would they ? This was the 
thought uppermost in the hearts of the women of Paris -^ that is, the 
poor women with hungry children — during that October Sunday in 
the year 1 789. And, as we shall see, the thought became a deed, 
when, on the Monday iollowing, tens of thousands of women, with an 
earnest purpose in their minds, marched on the palace of Versailles. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE INSURRECTION OF WOMEN. 

ON Monday morning, the 5th of October, Paris awoke to face 
once more a day of bitter want. Mothers heard their children 
crying for the bread which they could not give them ; and when they 
sallied forth to see what could be got, they met others on the same 
dreary errand. 

One young woman seized a drum and beat it, crying out at the 
same time to all mothers to assemble and go somewhere. A vast 
mob soon flocked to the sound of her drum ; and they bent their 
steps first of all toward the Town-hall, or Hotel de Ville, which they 
reached about seven o'clock. The patrol were greatly surprised to 
see eight or ten thousand women mount the outer stairs, and the fore- 
most levelled their bayonets to keep them back, but this was found 
impossible. The soldiers had to open their ranks and let the women 
through. They then hurried up the stairs, along the passages, and 
through the rooms. The major-general, Gouvion, was in the build- 
ing ; but what to do he knew not. He chanced to have a cunning 
man with him, named Maillard ; and Maillard stole out by a secret 
staircase, and caught hold of another drum, which he beat furiously 
outside. He thus drew off the women, who were doing much mischief. 
Angry at not finding the mayor, or any one to help them, they seized 
Abbe Lefevre in the belfry and nearly hanged him ; they splintered 
doors with axes, took away guns, and even cannon and bags of money, 
and were on the point of setting the fine old place on fire. 



46 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

When Maillard's drum was heard outside, the women streamed 
forth, and shouts of " To Versailles ! to Versailles ! " rent the air. 
Cart-horses were made to draw the cannon ; and on they all went to 
the Champs Elysees, where they halted. Maillard here persuaded 
them to nominate officers, and then to march with sonie kind of order, 
and with as few arms as' possible, to present their request for bread to 
the king and Assembly at Versailles. The day was miserable ; and on 
the sloppy road walked many a lady in her shoes of silk,' — not because 
she liked it, but because she was compelled. 

The news flew before the mob, and Mirabeau whispered to the 
President : " Paris is marching upon us. Go over to the Chateau and 
tell them." As soon as the women were well on the road, Gouvion 
collected a large force of National Guards. These men had felt the 
insult offered in the dinner business, and they sent to their general, 
Lafayette, to say that they would never turn their bayonets on the 
women, but they would go and abolish that insolent regiment of Flan- 
ders, and those Body Guards who had trampled on the tricolor cockade. 
They would then bring the king to Paris, where he ought to live. The 
general was amazed, and argued half the day against it ; then he tried 
to escape, but his men would not let him go, and there he sat on his 
white charger for hours, while the soldiers and people kept shouting 
" To Versailles ! " At length the general gave way, and about three 
o'clock moved thither with thirty thousand men ; a vast mob, irregu- 
larly armed, going on -in front. 

Maillard and his women halted on a rise above Versailles, and he 
pointed out the place where the Assembly was then debating. " Now," 
said he, "let us put these arms out of sight, and all appearance of 
sorrow, and let us sing." And so the women advanced up the drip- 
ping elm avenue, singing " Henri Quatre." The king, who had gone 
shooting, was hastily fetched back, and the soldiers were dispersed, 
about the palace in a posture of defence. While Mirabeau and the 
others were debating, in came Maillard and fifteen draggled women. 




THE INSURRECTION OF WOMEN. 



THE INSURRECTION OF WOMEN. 49 

He had had to use all his powers to keep the others outside. He 
spoke, and then the women cried out, " Bread ! bread ! " It was agreed 
that the president should take some of the women to the palace, and 
he went out with them. But others crowded round him, begging to 
be taken also ; and he was obliged to add twelve more. As they went 
they were scattered by some insolent hOrse soldiers who rode among 
their ranks, and it was only with much difficulty that they managed 
to reach the gate. 

Five of them were allowed to see the king ; and one of these, a 
maker of figures, and a handsome girl, nearly fainted ; whereupon the 
king supported her in his arms. When they went again into the 
crowd, this same young woman was nearly strangled by the others, 
who were angry at the notice taken of her by Louis. " She has no 
children that want bread," cried they; " only alabaster dolls which can- 
not eat." Poor Louison was in peril of death. The garter was round 
her neck, and strong arms pulling at each end, when she was rescued 
by two soldiers. 

It was a most miserable afternoon, and the soldiers were wet,. and 
losing patience, and slashing at people every now and then with their 
swords. One had his arm broken by a stray bullet, and the horse of 
another was killed ; of course these things did not mend matters. The 
cannon which had been trailed all the way from the Hotel de Ville 
were now levelled at the palace gate, but the powder was too damp to 
ignite. At length the Body Guards were ordered to retire, as their 
presence was irritating to the mob ; and whenever one showed himself 
at door or window, he was cursed and fired at. Then a rumor flew 
about that the king had got his coach ready as if for flight, and a sharp 
look-out was kept on the back gates. 

There was a certain draper, named Lecointre, who was rather fa- 
mous in these times of trouble. He now rode off to ask the mayor 
for six hundred loaves, but he could not get them nor aught else at 
present ; so they skinned and roasted the dead war-horse, and ate its 
flesh with much relish. 4 



50 



STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 



When the president got back, he found his Assembly-hall filled with 
women, making speeches and passing resolutions. A stout woman 
was comfortably seated in his own chair. Before she would give it up 
she told him they were all very hungry and must have something to 
eat. He took the hint, and sent round for food, which came at last, — 
bread, sausages, and some wine. The members now edged their way 
in, and began to discuss the Penal Code. One of the women said, 
" What is the use of the Penal Code .? What we want is bread ! " 

About the middle of that strange night Lafayette and his Nationals 
arrived, having spent nine hours on the road. Before reaching Ver- 
sailles he had made his men swear to respect the king's house. He 
was admitted to an audience, and told Louis he must do four things 
for the sake of peace, — he must be guarded by the National Guards ; 
he must get bread for the people ; he must have all the prisoners in 
Paris tried, and, if found innocent, set free ; and lastly, he must come 
and live in Paris. The king granted the first three readily, the last 
not so readily. 

Toward three in the morning, the sentries having been set, and 
other business done, sleep fell on the distracted multitudes ; and 
after two more hours of consultation with his officers, Lafayette flung 
himself on his bed, tired out. 

In the early dawn a Body Guard, looking out of a window in the 
palace, saw some prowling fellows below. Ill words were spoken ; and 
the soldier, waxing wroth, fired off his piece. Others returned it, and 
after some shots a young man in the crowd received his death-blow. 
Then there arose a fearful shriek from the mob, and a rush at the 
outer gate, which swept it open. The inner gate was also battered in, 
and then the people rushed up the grand staircase into the palace. 
Two sentries were trodden down and murdered, and the rest had to 
retire into a room and barricade the door, which was soon shivered to 
pieces. 

The savage mob went raging on toward the queen's suite of rooms, 



THE INSURRECTION OF WOMEN. 5 1 

in the farthest of which she was now sleeping. Some sentries before- 
hand with the crowd knocked, and cried, " Save the queen ! " Two 
officers of the Body Guard showed vast courage at that terrible hour, 
and by their heroic efforts stemmed the flood until the queen was able 
to get into the king's bedchamber. One of these men, Mismandre, 
was left for dead at the outside of the queen's door, but he was able 
to crawl away and join his comrades. 

From the king's bedroom they could hear afar off the noise of axes 
and hammers thundering on the doors. The rage of the people was 
directed mainly against the Body Guards, who were now driven into a 
large hall, and who heaped all sorts of things against the door. It 
shook under the blows dealt on it ; but at the very moment it was giv- 
ing way the blows ceased suddenly, and a voice from the other side 
told that a body of friends were there. By this time, also, Lafayette 
and his Nationals were on the scene, and the mob were soon driven 
out of the palace to rage in the courts below. The two Body Guards 
who had been killed on the staircase were beheaded, and their heads 
carried on long pikes through the streets and away to Paris. 

" The king to Paris ! " — such was the cry now everywhere. " The 
king must come to Paris ! " Nothing else would do. So at one 
o'clock the king agreed to start to Paris. When Lafayette announced 
the king's consent, there was a shout and a discharge of fire-arms. It 
was the knell of the glory of Versailles. 

Cartloads of bread arrived from Paris, enough for all ; and great was 
the joy of those who munched it. More than that, fifty wagon-loads 
of corn were found in Versailles, and carried in triumph to the famish- 
ing city. 

The king was now the prisoner of the mob, and most men saw what 
a grave thing it was. He had been conquered, and the people had 
once more learned their own strength. Many people now left France, 
and sixty thousand emigrated to Switzerland alone. 

One o'clock arrived, and the royal family entered their carriages ; 



52 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

but they did not start for another hour, — so long did it take to arrange 
the motley procession. What a sight it was ! Men carrying loaves 
on pike-points, or guns with green boughs sticking out of the barrels. 
Some rode on cannons ; and others, trying to mount the king's horses, 
were thrown, much to the amusement of the fickle mob. 

" We shall not lack bread now," said some witty Parisian, " for we 
are bringing with us the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's boy." 

At the Town-hall the king was made to step on a balcony by torch- 
light. He wore an immense tricolor cockade in his hat. It was not 
until eleven o'clock on Tuesday night that he reached the Tuileries, 
sad enough no doubt. This was the sixth day of October, 1 789. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE NATIONAL OATH. 

HAPPIER days followed the king's removal to Paris than were 
expected. The onward progress of the Revolution seemed for 
a time arrested. The palace of the Tuileries was splendidly furnished 
for the royal family, and the blue uniforms of the National Guards 
were ever seen patrolling before it. The little prince had a garden 
of his own, and a little summer-house, and tools to work with, and he 
might be watched at his work by the people as they passed along 
the street. The National Assembly held its sittings in the Riding" 
School close by, and were constantly engaged in the work of a new 
Constitution. 

The king no doubt felt the restraint laid upon him. He was free 
to go where he liked in the vast pile of the Tuileries and its spacious 
grounds ; he was also free to be driven anywhere about Paris, where 
he was well received ; but he was not free to roam the woods on a 
hunting expedition. He once more took to his favourite pursuit of 
lock-making, and, as we shall see, fitted up a secret iron safe in one 
of the walls, in wliich afterward many important State papers were 
found, some of which did him great damage at his trial. For forty- 
one months did Louis inhabit the palace, while the Revolution went 
on, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, to its end. 

Many of the senators, Mirabeau among them, saw that the power 
of the king was likely to be made too small, and they therefore tried 
to retain for him a certain part of the rule his ancestors had. On this 
account these men fell in the esteem of the masses. There were many 



54 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

of a different mind in the Assembly, — men like Robespierre and his 
party, who were for putting away the king altogether. 

Beside the senators, who actual!}^ made the laws, there were two 
things which wielded great power. One was the newspapers ; the other 
was the clubs. There were some papers loud for the king, others as 
loud for the people and dead against king and Nobles. Of those which 
were published against the king and Nobles, none was more bitter and 
outspoken than that edited by Marat, and called the " People's Friend." 
Amonsf the clubs there was one which has become more famous than 
any club which ever was or ever will be. It was called the Jacobin 
Club. It got that name from its meeting in what was once the 
Church of the Jacobins. This club, which began among the Bretons, 
was always noted for its extreme violence. The most advanced Re- 
publicans belonged to it. The old church was seated for twelve hun- 
dred, and there was a gallery as well for women. There the leading 
spirits of the Revolution used to speak their burning words. No one 
was admitted there except by a ticket. At first the Jacobin Club 
was not hot enough for some, while it was too violent for others ; 
and so two branches broke from it. Danton, of whom we shall hear 
much, formed the Club of the Cordeliers, which for a time was even 
hotter than that of the Jacobins ; but he and those who followed him 
after a time returned to the Jacobin Club, which was called the 
Mother Society. 

It happened one day that Louis thought it might do some good 
if he. paid a visit to the National Assembly in the Riding School ; so 
he sent word over to say he was coming. Some preparations were 
made for his visit, such as a purple covering with gold fleur-de-lis on 
it spread over the president's chair, so as to make it an impromptu 
throne, and a carpet laid down for his Majesty's feet. When Louis 
entered they all rose ; and when he said a few simple words in 
his own .simple way, they one and all gave him some hearty cheers. 
And when he was in his palace once more, some of the members 



THE NATIONAL OATH. 55 

were sent across to thank him for his kindness in visiting them ; and 
one of the senators proposed that they should all renew the National 
Oath. 

This idea was acted on at once. Every member stood up and 
swore afresh to be true to king, law, and country ; and the oath was 
also renewed at the Town-hall, and in all the streets of Paris, where 
vast excited crowds swore under the canopy of heaven, while drums 
rolled and the city was illum.inated. This was the fourth day of 
February, 1790. 

And then the idea went forth from Paris into every corner of 
France. For three weeks the swearing of the oath went on, till it 
is supposed every French man and woman had taken it. One mother 
in Brittany gathered her ten children, and made them all take the 
oath in her presence ; so that in many cases the children swore as 
well as the parents. 

But this simple visit of the king to the Assembly, and the simple 
act of one member suggesting that all the rest should renew the 
National Oath, led to a surprising scene in the following July ; for 
it occurred to some one that it would be a grand thing to assemble 
deputies from each department, or county or shire as we should say, 
in Paris, who there, as representing the whole of France, should swear 
the oath in the presence of the king, the army, the Assembly, and as 
many citizens as could be packed together. 

Each town and city had its own swearing-day before the grand 
one at Paris. We read the account of a very fine one at Lyons, 
written by Madame Roland, the wife of the famous minister of state, — 
where there was a rock made of painted wood, fifty feet in height, with 
a huge figure of Liberty on the top and a sort of temple beneath. 
Fifty thousand men assembled on that occasion to swear, and there 
were four times that number of people looking on. 

But as Paris was the greatest city of all, and the mother city, so 
her grand swearing-day was to surpass all others. It was decided that 



56 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

it should be on the same day as the fall of the Bastille and in the 
Champ de Mars, and nothing should be spared to make it the grandest 
thing of its kind. A huge sort of theatre was to be scooped out of the 
earth in the Champ de Mars by the spades of fifteen thousand work- 
men. But the work was not begun soon enough, and it seemed that 
the fifteen thousand were rather lazy, and refused to do more work 
when offered more wages; therefore, when they threw down their tools 
one July afternoon, a number of volunteers picked them up, and began 
to work with a will. The next day, instead of waiting till the spades 
and barrows were not in use, the excited citizens brought picks and 
shovels of their own, and came marching to the scene of action, headed 
by young women carrying green boughs, and shouting the famous Ca 
ira ! — " It shall go on ! " 

The effect was wonderful ; you might count, if you cared to take 
the trouble, volunteer workers to the number of a hundred and fifty 
thousand, men of every trade and profession, — printers in paper caps, 
water-carriers, charcoal-men, the rag-sorter, and the elegant dandy, 
the lawyer and the judge, the mayor himself, and General Lafayette. 
The king came to see the strange sight, and was very well received. 
A number of men surrounded him, spades on shoulders, as a sort of 
body-guard suited to the occasion. He used afterward to say, poor 
man ! that those days were some of the happiest he ever spent. 

Even ladies came to help, and some patriotic wine-merchant would 
now and then trundle into the diggings a barrel of wine. So earnest 
were the laborers that no one thought of drinking any of the wine, 
except such as were faint from their unusual exertions. And so by 
means of all this genuine labor, so heartily bestowed, the huge space 
of three. hundred thousand square feet was excavated, and so arranged 
that thei-e were rows of grassy seats one above another to the number 
of thirty, all well rammed down and covered with turf. 

In the centre, so as to be seen by all, there was a pyramid, called 
the Altar of the Country. Here the oath was to be sworn, — by 




THE NATIONAL OATH : THE EXCAVATIONS. 



THE NATIONAL OATH. 



59 



General Lafayette for the army, by the king, and by deputies who 
came from every department in France. 

When the great day arrived, it was a cold morning for July, and 
it looked as if rain might fall ; but the people streamed in, and took 
their places where they would. Each of the eighty-three departments 
had sent a splendid banner; and a fine show the men made as they 
filed in and took their appointed stations. Lafayette took the oath 
first. He ascended the pyramid, pressed his sword-point on the altar, 
and pronounced the oath in the name of the whole army. The 
National Assembly swore where they stood, under the canopy ; then 
the king swore, and there arose a shout, and citizen shook hands with 
citizen ; and there was a clashing of arms, and a booming of great 
guns, which were listened for, and responded to as soon as heard, — so 
that all over France that afternoon the tidings of the oath at Paris 
was carried by one volley after another. 

Perhaps it was this firing of cannon which brought down the long- 
impending shower. Anyhow the shower did come, and the seats were 
suddenly a canopy of umbrellas, and the flags drooped, and the ladies' 
dresses were spoiled. At three o'clock the sun shone out again, and 
the clouds went their way. A whole week was spent in brilliant feasts 
and merry-making. On the Sunday after the great oath-day a univer- 
sal dance took place. The Elysian Fields were almost as bright as 
day with innumerable lamps, and filled with dancers all the livelong 
night ; and where the grim old Bastille once reared its frowning walls 
one could read Ici Von danse, beneath the tree of Liberty, sixty feet 
high, and topped with a cap of Liberty. 

In fact, for a whole week or more Paris was almost wild with joy, 
and it was hoped, though the hope proved vain, that the Ship of State, 
after a few rough squalls, was now in calm waters, which were not 
again to be ruffled by serious storms. 



CHAPTER IX. 

TROUBLES IN THE ARMY. 

AT Metz, which is a strong fortress, an officer named Bouille com- 
manded the troops. He was an exceedingly brave man and a 
very loyal one. He looked upon the great National Oath with much 
dislike and suspicion. He did not approve of soldiers and citizens 
being too familiar with each other. He did not like his soldiers to 
mix freely with the people and imbibe their liberal ideas. He knew 
very well that the army was tainted with those notions, and the troops 
were becoming every day more mutinous. In those days no man 
could be an officer unless he was able to prove his nobility for at least 
four generations. The officers, therefore, were of the most select 
class, every man an aristocrat; and they spared no pains to show their 
dislike to these new and strange events. The privates were leavened 
with the popular spirit ; they were beginning to think that one man 
is as good as another ; they were beginning to resent the haughtiness 
of their officers; and they talked often and much over their own 
grievances. 

One great grievance was that they were not paid their wages; and 
they believed the officers robbed them of their money. General Bouille, 
therefore, at this time did not rest upon a bed of roses. He felt like 
a man who lives over a powder-magazine, where people go in and out 
with lighted matches. But his heart was like a rock ; braver man 
than Bouille never drew a sword. When the Regiment of Picardy 
boisterously embraced National Guards, and sang, and swore oaths to- 
gether in disorderly array, the general had the men up in the barrack 



TROUBLES IN THE ARMY. 6 1 

square, and gave them a bit of his mind very sharply. And when the 
Regiment of Salm advanced to the colonel's house to lay violent 
hands on the money-chest, Bouille, hearing of it, ran before them, and 
stood like an iron statue on the outer stairs, sword in hand, keeping 
the whole regiment at bay. For two hours he stood there, supported 
by a few of his brother officers. Several times some wrathful soldier 
was persuaded by a hater of aristocrats to level his musket at the in- 
trepid general ; but in every case the barrel was struck aside before he 
could fire. Bouille never flinched, nor cared a straw for aught any 
man among them might choose to do. After two hours the mayor 
interfered, and got the men back to their quarters by promises of pay, 
which were fulfilled in a measure the next day, when each soldier re- 
ceived half his arrears in cash. 

So bad was the discipline of the army, indeed, that Mirabeau 
moved that it should be broken up and organized afresh ; but his 
motion was not carried. The place where the army was in the worst 
possible position for drifting suddenly into open mutiny was Nanci in 
Lorraine. Nanci was more aristocratic than other places, both in her 
citizens and governors ; but she had also a large population who were 
kept up to revolution pitch by a Jacobin Club ; and there were here 
three fine regiments much tainted with the spreading evil, and quite 
ripe for mischief, — one especially so, that of Chateau Vieux. The offi- 
cers at Nanci had made many objections to the oath-swearing which 
had gone on. At first they would not go at all to the Nanci meeting, 
and when they repented and went, they appeared in undress suits, and 
shirts that needed the washerwoman ; and one' ofiicer was seen to spit 
in a marked manner when the national tricolor was carried beside 
him. 

The large regiment of Chateau Vieux was in the month of 
August, 1790 (only one month after the grand oath-swearing in the 
Champ de Mars), in a very bad humor, and justly so; for while an- 
other regiment had been paid three gold louis per man. Chateau 



62 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Vieux got the " cat-o-nine-tails." Another regiment, that called " du 
Roi," got hold of its money-chest, but for some reason did not break 
it open. 

An inspector, named Malseigne, was sent down by the Assembly 
to inquire into the soldiers' grievances, and, as far as he could, to 
rectify them. He was a big, strong man, and brave enough, but he 
had not much tact; and so it happened that his bluff, bullying man- 
ner led him into all sorts of troubles at Nanci. The men of the 
Chateau Vieux shut him up in the barrack court where he was holding 
his inspection, with cries of " Decide it at once ! " He got angry, drew 
his sword, and tried to break through the crowd. He broke his sword, 
seized another, wounded a sentry, and got out. He retired to a house, 
the soldiers following. He shut the door, got out the back way, and 
reached the Town-hall in safety. Next day he tried again to settle 
the matters of the Chateau Vieux, but none would listen. Then he 
ordered them to leave Nanci, but they refused. He then summoned 
the National Guards to his aid, and by Saturday four thousand had 
arrived. Still the regiment would not march as ordered. " Pay us," 
they said, " and we will march to the world's end." 

About noon that day, Malseigne escaped from Nanci to Luneville, 
where there was, he knew, a loyal regiment of Carbineers. He was 
chased by about a hundred soldiers ; but he reached the loyal regiment, 
and ordered them to fire at his pursuers. The Nanci soldiers, being 
fired on, rode back again and spread the alarm. " The Carbineers are 
sold to the Austrians,'-' cried they. Whereupon the three Nanci regi- 
ments rose up as one man, and marched to Luneville. A parley fol- 
lowed, and matters were explained. Inspector Malseigne was given 
up, and marched back to Nanci ; but lo ! the big man broke away, and 
was off like a shot, and escaped with only one bullet in his coat. He 
made a wide, wheeling flight, and returned to the Carbineers, who 
gave him up a second time ; and the next day the mutinous soldiers 
put him in prison, whither they had also placed Denoue, the com- 




"THE DETERMINED OFFICER SAT ON THE TOUCH-HOLE. 



TROUBLES IN THE ARMY. 65 

mandant of Nanci. When Bouille heard of these daring acts of re- 
bellion, — of a government inspector and a leading officer in prison, 
and three regiments in open mutiny, — he thought a decisive blow ought 
to be struck at once. He had a much smaller force than that of the 
mutineers, but he had law on his side. When he reached the village 
of Frouarde, he sent this message : " You must submit in twenty-four 
hours, or I shall make war upon you." 

A deputation of soldiers from the mutinous regiments, and one 
from the civil authorities of Nanci, went out to Bouille in the course 
of the day. The soldiers, however, were stubborn and even insolent, 
but they did not move the general. He insisted on total surrender, 
or he would storm Nanci. Distracted were the citizens, distracted 
were the soldiers ; the regiment of Chateau Vieux being for resistance 
unto death, the others for giving in to Bouille. 

At half-past two the terrible Bouille was about a mile and a half 
from the city gates, and another deputation went forth to meet him. 
He granted an hour's respite. Nothing coming of it, the terrified citi- 
zens could see the faces of his advanced guard, only thirty paces off. 
A flag of truce was then carried forth, and an offer of submission 
made. 

Now, while the victorious Bouille was arranging how the mutinous 
regiments should leave the city, a very dreadful thing happened. In 
the city were many, both citizens and soldiers, who looked upon 
Bouille as a traitor, and were therefore opposed to the surrender. 
These men got hold of some loaded cannon, and levelled them 
through the gateway at Bouille's army. A young captain, seeing 
lighted matches were being brought to the cannon, flung himself in 
front of the mouth of one, and swore that if they did fire it the discharge 
should blow him to atoms ; and when he was pulled away from the 
cannon-mouth by a number of soldiers, the determined officer sat on 
the touch-hole. This time the frantic soldiers were not content with 
dragging him off his perch ; they shot him down as he sat there on 

. 5 



66 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

the touch-hole, and then applied a match to the priming. The can- 
non roared, and fifty men of Bouille's vanguard were killed. Oh, the 
rage of the men outside ! With levelled bayonet and many a furious 
oath they dashed through the gate, and then was seen a terrible car- 
nage. Friend killed friend by mistake that day, for all were so mixed 
up that it was often difficult to know who were fighting for Bouille 
and who were fighting against him. Another cannon, ready loaded, 
was rendered harmless by a ready-witted woman, who threw a bucket 
of water on the priming. When the awful scrimmage was over, half 
the mutinous Chateau Vieux were found stretched on a gory bed, and 
many National Guards who fought with them. Bouille's losses, too, 
were great. By the time he reached the great Square he was minus 
forty ofiBcers and five hundred men, which shows how obstinately the 
city was defended, and at what a cost he won his victory. 

The mutinous regiments, now shattered and subdued, had to 
march, each on its appointed route, and peace was restored for 
a time. 

Paris was fearfully agitated by the news, and a solemn funeral ser- 
vice was held for the slain. The Assembly voted thanks to Bouille 
by a great majority ; but the lowest ranks of the people, to the number 
of forty thousand, assembled under the windows of the Riding School, 
and demanded that the slain mutineers should be aveno^ed. 

Whether Bouille was right or whether he was wrong, he at least 
quelled in military fashion the spirit of mutiny, and made the whole 
French army feel that it had at least one captain who could maintain 
discipline, without which an army is only an armed mob. We mourn 
over the death of so many brave Frenchmen, but we cannot help 
admiring the iron determination of General Bouille in doing what he 
believed to be his duty. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE DEATH OF MIRABEAU. 

AS long as Mirabeau lived, the king had a friend on whom he 
could depend. It pleased God, however, to remove this great 
man when he seemed to be of the utmost use to the French monarchy. 
When he saw men were going too far and too fast irt the direction of 
changing all the old order, he became a check on their wheels ; and 
he was so mighty in deed and word that it may be truly said he upheld 
for some time with his one hand the tottering throne. 

But he did it at the expense of his strength, and he died, worn out 
by his immense exertions. No one who had not lived with him and 
seen him at work could imagine what Mirabeau was able to do in a 
day. Some one once said to him that such and such things were 
impossible ; when he started up and exclaimed, " Never speak that 
brute of a word to me any more." 

We cannot now follow every step of this great Frenchman, nor 
understand all he meant to do and would have done had his life been 
spared. We do know, however, that he was most anxious to remove 
Louis from the Tuileries. 

One night he met the queen in the garden of St. Cloud, and talked 
over this important matter. She was far more resolute than her royal 
husband. She was a daughter of the famous Theresa of Austria, 
and had inherited some of her lofty qualities. In fact, as Mirabeau 
said of the queen, " She is the only man his Majesty has about him." 
Louis lacked decision, — he never could make up his mind; and he 



68 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

dreaded above all things a civil war. But no civil war could have 
been so terrible as the French Revolution proved to be. Had the 
king left Paris as Mirabeau advised, and flung abroad his banner 
and rallied his loyal subjects, and put down, as he might have done, 
the lawless spirit that was abroad, and had he then resolved to rule 
his people in righteousness', by the advice of the wisest men in France, 
his reign might have been glorious instead of disastrous, and when 
he died the criers might have gone about the saddened streets sound- 
ing their bells and saying, " Le bon roi Louis, pere du peuple, est 
mort." But it was not in Louis to take this decided step in time. 
He waited and waited, and then ran away in a clumsy fashion, and, 
after being stopped at Varennes, he was brought back to Paris in 
disgrace. 

The health of Mirabeau had been much impaired by the excessive 
labors he underwent in managing the affairs of the nation during those 
most stormy times. The month of March in the year 1791 had 
arrived. Matters were getting worse instead of better. Duels were 
being daily fought between the members of the French Parliament, 
and deadly anger glowed between those who loved the king and those 
who loved him not. One such duel we wall notice, as it shows how 
the people sided with their champions. A man named Lameth was 
a prominent leader of the people. He fought the Duke de Castries 
with swords. As Lameth was making a lunge at the duke's body, his 
own sword-arm ran. against the point of , the duke's sword, and was 
frightfully ripped open. The duel was over, and the people's friend 
was nearly dead. When the fight ended, the people attacked the 
duke's house, and flung all his furniture, pictures, and valuables 
into the street. But not a single thing was stolen ; for this order 
went about: "The man who steals even a nail shall be hanged." 

But to return to the dying Mirabeau. In the month of March, 
1 791, his strength was evidently giving way. As far back as the 
January before he was obliged, when he came to the Assembly, to 



THE DEATH OF MIRABEAU. 69 

wear linen cloths about his neck, and after the morning debate was 
over, to apply leeches to his head. He said one day to a friend about 
this time : " I am dying ; I feel as if I were being burned up by a slow 
fire. When I am gone, they will know how much I was worth." 

Things went on thus until the end of March, when the great 
senator got worse. On the 27th of that month, as he was on 
his way to the Assembly, he was forced to rest at a friend's house, 
lying for some time on a sofa in a half-conscious state. When he had 
recovered, he went to the debate, and spoke no less than five times with 
all his old fiery energy. He then left the tribune (that is, the speaker's 
pulpit), and never was seen in it any more. It was Mirabeau's last 
effort to do what good he could for his distracted country. 

Though his popularity had been waning because he opposed the 
wild schemes of such ignorant quacks as Robespierre, yet, when he 
was laid in the last days of March on his death-bed, there was hardly 
a man in Paris who did not feel that his end was a lamentable event. 
The meanest men in the city jostled against the highest at the door- 
step, to ask how Mirabeau was. The people of their own free will 
blocked the street, and allowed no carriage to rattle by and so disturb 
the sufferer; and every three hours an account of his health was given 
by the doctors, copied out, printed on hand-bills, and circulated all 
over Paris. 

The second day of April came. It was a Saturday, and the dying 
man felt sure that he should not live to see the sun rise any more. 
" I wish," said he to some one who was supporting his head in his last 
struggle, — "I wish I could leave it to you." After the power of speech 
had left him, he motioned for a pen and paper, and wrote the word 
"Opium." The doctor said, " No." Mirabeau wrote next the word 
" Dormir," and pointed to it. At half-past eight in the morning the 
end came, and the greatest of Frenchmen had left his country bereft 
of his wisdom. 

A great gloom and a strange silence fell upon the gay and busy 



70 



STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 



city. Every theatre was closed while Mirabeau lay unburied; and 
wherever the people heard the sounds of music and singing, they 
knocked loudly at the door, and insisted on the party being broken 
up at once. 

In every street during the next few days you might see men here 
and there, standing and proclaiming with loud voices and sorrowful 
faces the virtues and services of the dead statesman. The public 
funeral, which took place on Monday, the 4th of April, was one of 
the most w^onderful ever seen. The procession itself was three miles 
in length. It was five o'clock on a sunny April afternoon when 
Mirabeau was thus carried to his long home, through crowds esti- 
mated by the hundred thousand. National Guards in double file 
lined the route, and the deep silence was every now and then broken 
by the rolling of drums. At the Church of St. Eustache the procession 
halted to hear a funeral oration ; and when the speaker had finished, 
the National Guards discharged their muskets in the church, and the 
vibration caused portions of the roof to fall. It was almost midnight 
before the great burial was done, and Mirabeau was left sleeping 
amono^ the worthies of France in the Church of St. Genevieve. 

It is painful to think how the Paris mob afterward took up his 
remains and^cast them out in dishonor. This was done by the people 
in July, 1793, when they buried their apostle Marat where Mirabeau 
had been laid. Mirabeau did not please the men who adored Marat. 
Mirabeau was by birth a noble, and, though a great reformer of abuses 
and a remodeller of the rotten old constitution, he was one who tried 
to set up the ancient monarchy on a new and firmer basis, and for this 
he was hated by the more violent party. And when, as we shall see, 
the iron chest which the king and the blacksmith made in the Tuil- 
eries was discovered and its papers examined, Mirabeau's share in the 
attempts to get the king removed from Paris was found out, and his 
bust in the hall of the Jacobin Club was shivered to atoms by a man 
who mounted a ladder and hurled it to the ground. 




THE DEATH 01 



1 A 1 M 



THE DEATH OF MIRABEAU. 73 

So died, so was buried, Gabriel Honore Mirabeau, a most illustrious 
man, who crushed the old nobility, as a privileged class, with one 
hand, while he kept down the madness of the people with the other. 
He was always a favorite with women, and even the rough fishwives 
would mount the gallery steps and listen with delight to his speeches ; 
and he was called by them always "Our little mother Mirabeau." 



CHAPTER XL 

, , THE KING'S FLIGHT. 

THE king, who had not been very well in the spring of 1791, 
decided on keeping the festival of Easter at the Palace of St. 
Cloud. The proposed plan was published with a good deal of parade, 
as though he wished his subjects to take particular notice of it ; which 
they did, in a very disagreeable manner. For when the day of his 
little jaunt arrived, and the old family coach, with its eight horses, 
rolled up to the grand entrance of the Tuileries, the bell of St. 
Roche pealed out its notes of alarm, and a crowd assembled with the 
rapidity of wild-fire to stop his Majesty's journey. In vain the king 
appealed to his loving subjects to let him go. In vain did General 
Lafayette fret and strive. It would not do. The king should keep 
his Easter at Paris and nowhere else. For one hour and three quar- 
ters did this strange contest go on ; and then Louis had to give way, 
and descend .crestfallen from his coach, feeling now that he was 
indeed a captive. This was on the 1 8th of April, just one fortnight 
after Mirabeau's funerarl. 

The king felt excessively mortified at this treatment, and nursed 
the plan of escape day and night from thenceforth. As it had now 
become a difficult matter to get away, he was determined to do it, and 
without much loss of time. 

The queen dops not seem to have acted very wisely in her prep- 
arations for the great event. As she was about to leave Paris, she 
thought it necessary to order a vast number of dresses and other toilet 
matters which she thought she could not live without ; and so she 



THE KING'S FLIGHT. 75 

managed to keep suspicion on the alert. A lady in her suite, who 
was a friend of the people, whispered her secrets to General Gouvion, 
second in command of the National Guard ; and he looked the more 
carefully to his sentries, and kept a yet sharper watch on every car- 
riage which came in or went out of the Tuileries. 

Some rooms in the palace which had been occupied by a certain 
duke were now empty, the duke having emigrated in a pet ; and as 
they had a convenient door of egress, the queen occupied them, in- 
tending to slip out when the important moment arrived. There was 
a certain Swedish count, named Fersen, who had much to do with 
the king's flight. He got a new coach built big enough to carry the 
whole royal family, a lot of luggage, and several Body Guards. He 
told the coachmaker that it was for a Russian baroness, and it was 
built accordingly, the count being very particular about its construc- 
tion. This great lumbering affair did not come near the Tuileries, as 
it might have aroused the suspicion of the sentries on duty. An 
ordinary glass coach waited on the night of June 20, not far from 
the palace. The coachman on the box was none other than Count 
Fersen. By and by a lady with a hood, and two children, wearing 
hoods also, came from the duke's door into the court, and thence into 
the street, and entered the coach. Then came another lady, followed 
by a gentleman in a round hat, and they got in also, but the coach- 
man still waited. Now the suspicious lady of the bedchamber had her 
own reasons for supposing the royal family meant to escape that very 
night; and she told Gouvion, and he told Lafayette, and Lafayette 
came himself in his carriage to see with his own eyes whether all was 
well or not at the Tuileries. Now the general's carriage, driven at a 
rapid pace and glaring with lamps, passed so close to a lady in a 
broad-brimmed gypsy hat, that she was able to touch one of its wheels 
with a light stick which she held in her hand. That lady was Marie 
Antoinette, the Queen of France. Somewhat flurried by the noise and 
lights of Lafayette's carriage, the queen, as she went to the glass coach 



76 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

that was waiting, took the wrong turn instead of the right one. A 
servant attended her ; but the stupid man did not know his way about, 
and he and the queen wandered about the streets until they had wasted 
one precious hour. What must the gentleman in the round hat have 
felt all this time ? For he was the king, and the two children were 
his children, and one of the ladies was his sister. 

And how the count on the box must have fretted at the delay ! 
But at length the queen appeared, and stepped in ; the stupid servant 
got up behind, the count cracked his whip, and they were off. The 
poet in " John Gilpin " says, — 

" The stones did rattle underneath, 
As if Cheapside were mad ;" , 

and, surely, not less did the stones of the Rue de Grammont rattle, 
as the royal family of France were borne away rapidly toward the 
Russian lady's big new coach. Before long it was in sight, waiting 
there with its six horses ; and in a few moments the gentleman in the 
round hat, the lady in the gypsy bonnet, and the others were seated in 
it. As for the glass coach, the count turned it round, and left it to 
its fate, and it was found the next morning in the ditch. The count 
jumped on the box of the new carriage he had been so anxious about, 
cracked his whip, and made the six horses go as fast as they could ; but 
the progress was dolefully small. The new coach travelled only sixty- 
nine miles in twenty-two hours. 

When Count Fersen had done his part, he made a low bow, and 
took his leave ; and on went the king's new coach with its six horses, 
another chaise behind with a pair, and three couriers in yellow, each 
astride of a nag, making a cavalcade of eleven horses in all. What 
an unwise display ! Now and then there was something amiss with 
the harness, and delays occurred ; and when the huge machine had to 
be dragged up a hill, the king got out and walked. General Bouille 
had soldiers stationed here and there along the route, and every- 




DROUET COMPARING THE FACE ON THE ASSIGNAT WITH THE FACE UNDER 

THE ROUND HAT. 



THE KING'S FLIGHT. 79 

thing was done which seemed best; but the whole affair was mis- 
managed, and ended in grievous failure. 

At a village named St. Menehould there lived at that time an old 
soldier named Drouet. He had retired from service, and was master 
of the post there. He was a stanch patriot (as the favorers of the 
revolution were then called), and on that eventful night he happened 
to be in a very bad temper because some one had interfered with his 
privileges. Toward sunset the great coach rumbled into the village, 
attracting by its splendor everybody's notice, and especially that of the 
old soldier Drouet. His suspicions were at once aroused ; and while 
the royal party were halting, he scanned carefully the side face of the 
gentleman inside, and thought he had seen him before somewhere. 
Was it in the Champ de Mars last July ? 

" Fetch me a new assignat," said he to some one near. An as- 
signat was a sort of bank-note, with the king's head engraved on it. 
Drouet had no sooner compared the face on the assignat with the 
face under the round hat than he felt quite sure the gentleman was 
the king, attempting to escape. 

As quick as thought Drouet told his mind to another old dragoon, 
and they two, mounting swift-footed horses, were off, having first 
whispered a word to the village authorities to rouse what National 
Guards and patriot men there might be in St. Menehould. Off then 
rode the two old dragoons, and after a rough night-ride reached Va- 
rennes before the king and his party had succeeded in leaving it. 
Bouille's son was here to receive them ; but the foolish young fellow, 
thinking all was over for the night, had gone to bed. While the king 
was trying to get fresh horses, a good half-hour was wasted, and dur- 
ing that half-hour Drouet and his comrade had reached the village 
and stopped the king's progress. They had found a light still burn- 
ing in the Golden Arm Inn ; and the landlord, whose name was 
Le Blanc, was serving guests. Entering in, Drouet called the land- 
lord aside, and asked, " Art thou a good patriot ? " Le Blanc said, " I 



8o STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

am ; " and then Drouet whispered his story in his ear. Then, while 
Le Blanc bestirred himself in his own way, the two old soldiers went 
out and blocked the road by overturning a furniture van, and by add- 
ing to it such other things as barrows, barrels, and the like. Le Blanc 
by this time had brought his brother and one or two other patriots ; 
and the party then stood, muskets in hand, awaiting the arrival of the 
king and his cavalcade. When the coach reached the place, its way 
was barred. It had to stop, and at the same moment the barrels of 
two guns were thrust into the coach windows, and a gruff voice de- 
manded passports. There was no further advance to be thought of ; 
no friendly aid was near ; no young Bouille and his troopers ; noth- 
ing was to be done but to stay the remainder of the short night in the 
village. The baffled royal party put up at a grocer's shop, where they 
were served with bread and cheese and a bottle of burgundy. 

Thus was the king taken captive, and so did his attempted flight 
come to an inglorious end. About seven o'clock on Saturday night 
the great coach might have been seen returning to Paris. The king 
was carried through a vast crowd of silent and wondering citizens, who 
had been instructed by a widely circulated placard how to behave on 
the occasion. " Whoever insults Louis shall be caned," it said ; " and 
whoever applauds him shall be hanged." 



CHAPTER XII. 

A YEAR AFTER THE KING'S FLIGHT. 

WHEN the king was brought back to the Tuileries, he was at 
first watched more closely than before. Even outside the bed- 
room door a sentinel was stationed ; and one night, when the queen 
could not sleep, a National Guard offered to sit by her bedside and 
have a little chat with her. 

But in a while the king's friends had contrived to surround him 
with eighteen hundred loyal men, selected from various districts of 
France, all under command of the Duke de Brissac. Beside these, 
Louis had his Swiss Guards stationed in or about the palace. By 
and by, too, the flight to Varennes seemed more or less forgotten, and 
Lafayette obtained a general amnesty ; that is, a forgiveness of all past 
faults on all sides. The king and queen might now be seen sometimes 
at the Opera; and vivats — that is, cheers — were sometimes raised as 
the royal equipage rolled through the streets. On the 30th of Sep- 
tember the old Assembly was dissolved, after sitting nearly twenty-nine 
months, and a new one began its labors the next day. The streets 
were illuminated, and two very popular deputies named Robespierre 
and Petion were carried home on men's shoulders amid much shout- 
ing. So the twelve hundred who had met in the Tennis Court, and 
there had vowed- to complete their work in spite of all, were broken 
up and went their ways. 

The new Parliament consisted of seven hundred and forty-five men, 
and they were mostly of a patriot turn of mind. No less than four 
hundred of them were lawyers. The king had some friends in this 

6 



82 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Parliament, but they were lovers of liberty too. The extreme revolu- 
tionary men sat on the left side of the president, on some benches high 
up, and so got the name of " The Men of the Mountain." 

The country, though fairly quiet upon the whole, was in an ex- 
plosive state, and a riot broke out every now and then. La Vendee 
had to be carefully watched all the winter long by General Dumouriez, 
a very able soldier. The Mayor of Etampes, who hung out a red flag 
(the same as reading the Riot Act), was trampled to death. As for 
the navy and army, they were in a wretched state ; and the law was 
slack to punish crime. The king's party worked very hard to keep up 
an appearance of loyalty. Some of the leading Republicans (Danton, 
for instance) were hushed by presents of money ; and men were actually 
hired to applaud the king when he appeared in public. Some of the 
lowest of the Paris populace were also hired to applaud speeches favor- 
able to the king in the Assembly. Men, too, were paid to " write up " 
the monarchy. The king's friends who had emigrated hoped, of course, 
for the restoration of the past. It was said that Coblentz had become 
a second Versailles ; for there the princes and nobles chiefly gathered 
and enrolled themselves in a little army, ready when the time came to 
invade France and punish the rebellious people ; and letters written 
in cipher frequently passed to and fro between these emigrants out- 
side France and the king's friends at home. A certain newspaper 
called the " Friend of the King " {Ami du Roi) was able to name the 
number of those who wer-e biding their time for the invasion of France. 
There were, according to that paper, four hundred and nineteen thou- 
sand foreign soldiers and fifteen thousand emigrants. All this was 
enough to incense highly the French people ; for they knew if the 
king's foreign friends came down on them, they would be punished 
horribly for behaving as they had to their sovereign. It was therefore 
a very anxious time for both people and ruler. 

In the month of June, 1792, the Duke of Brunswick declared 
openly that it was high time to march on Paris and deliver Louis 



A YEAR AFTER THE KING'S FLIGHT. 83 

from his troubles. A camp of twenty thousand national volunteers 
was thereupo*n decreed by the French Government for the needful 
defence of the city, each man to be a picked patriot. It was also 
decreed that the priests, as presumed friends of the king and favorers 
of Brunswick, should be banished. What did the king now do } He 
placed his veto (" I forbid ") on each of these decrees. He was remon- 
strated with by Roland, the Minister of the Interior, in a very plain 
letter ; but the king stuck to his veto, and all his ministers resigned 
in consequence. This happened on the 13th of June, 1792. Both the 
decrees were hateful to the king, for he knew the twenty thousand 
volunteers would be violent Jacobins, and the priests were his friends ; 
and so he said " Veto " to both. But as he did it he was pulling the 
house down upon his head; he was raising a storm which swept him 
from the palace to the prison of the Temple. 

Paris was now in a state of frenzy. The Duke of Brunswick was 
just about to march, and yet the king forbade their raising a garrison 
of twenty thousand patriots for the defence of their homes and wives. 
It was now that every patriot who had the courage of a man screwed 
that courage to the sticking-point, and resolved to do or die. One 
deputy after another came to the Parliament to entreat it to alter 
the king's power of veto. It was now that Barbaroux, a fiery South- 
countryman, wrote to Marseilles for " six hundred men who knew 
how to die ! " 

The 20th of June arrived ; it had already become a memorable 
day, for it was the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. Some of 
the citizens of Paris had resolved to celebrate the day by planting a 
tree of liberty near the Tuileries, and by also, perhaps, having a word 
or two with the king himself, if they could see him, on the subject of 
the veto. 

On the morning of this eventful day the tree of liberty was ready. 
It was a Lombardy poplar, and it was lying quietly on a sort of car, 
ready to be moved when the time came. The authorities, fearful of 



84 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

riot and bloodshed, attempted to stop the affair; but the people assured 
them that they had the most peaceful intentions, and only wished to 
plant a tree and have a word with their king. So the procession set 
forward, each moment swelled by hundreds from every alley and court 
of the suburb of St. Antoine. A curious banner was borne aloft." It 
was no less than a pair of' old black silk breeches, with these words 
as a motto in French : " Tremble, tyrants ! here are the Sansculottes ! " 
(Sansculotte was a cant name given to the poorest patriots by the 
Royalists ; it means " destitute of breeches.") 

Once more the authorities tried to stop the crowd ; but the leaders 
answered them : " We are as peaceable as doves ; we mean no harm. 
We cannot stop now ; and you would better come with us." And so the 
patriot stream followed on until it reached the Riding School, where 
the Parliament was met for business. Here an address was read ; and 
then the multitude surrounded the palace, all the gates of which had 
been carefully closed. Within the courts were ranked the National 
Guards. The Swiss were at their posts, and the palace itself was 
crowded with Royalists in black clothes, who had come to support 
their king. Every man of this sort had a " ticket of entry," which he 
showed to the sentinel at the gate. 

The Lombardy poplar was planted, — not where they wished, for 
the place was closed, but in a garden not far off ; and now, as the king 
would not come out to them, they resolved to force their way in to 
him. In this they were helped by the National Guards inside. Those 
men, never very loyal, yielded to the speech of the mob leaders, and 
opened the gate. The multitude poured through, and were soon surg- 
ing up the grand stairs into the interior of the Tuileries. It was a 
repetition of the insurrection of women at Versailles. Loud were the 
knockings on the door behind which the poor distracted monarch 
stood, — knockings that could not be overlooked, for soon the panels 
were smashed in. Louis opened the door and asked them hastily, 
" What do you want here ? " Loud shouts of " Veto ! " " Remove the 




THE QUEEN PUTTING THE RED CAP ON HER LITTLE SON'S HEAD. 



A YEAR AFTER THE KING'S FLIGHT. 87 

veto ! " answered his question. Others shouted, " Bring back the 
patriot ministers ! " Louis answered with much dignity, " This is not 
the time to do it in, nor is this the proper way to ask me." 

A few soldiers managed to get the king into the bow of a window, 
and there he stood for some time. One man thrust a red cap into his 
hand, and he set it upon his head. Another offered him a bottle, and 
he put it to his lips. The queen sat in an inner room with her chil- 
dren and sister-in-law, behind a barricade of tables, in tears and terror 
of heart. And this went on for fully three hours. The gentlemen had 
all disappeared, fearful of doing more harm than good to the king's 
cause. After a time the Mayor of Paris (Petion was his name), a very 
advanced patriot who had just now much influence with the mob, per- 
suaded the people to retire. They obeyed his voice ; and as they 
passed through the room where the queen sat behind her tables, a 
woman presented her with a red cap, which she put on her little son's 
head. It was not until eight o'clock that the palace was clear of the 
people, and the king and queen, much agitated, were able to embrace 
each other with many tears after enduring such terrors. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE MARSEILLESE. 

AFTER the king had attempted to escape on the longest day in 
the year 1791, many were the stormy debates in the French 
Parhament on the subject. The question uppermost for a time was, 
" What are we to do with the monarchy ? " Some answered briefly and 
bluntly, " Do with it ? Why, do away with it." " Do with it } " asked 
the Royalists. " Preserve it at any cost ; " and, for the present, the 
advice of the Royalists was followed, and the " Men of the Mountain " 
were silenced. But yet from all parts of France there came petitions 
that the monarch should be deposed ; and one very urgent body of 
patriots came all the way from Marseilles to beg that the king, who 
ran away like a naughty boy from school, should no longer sit on the 
throne. One of these fiery speakers said these remarkable words : 
" When our ancestors landed on the coast of France and founded our 
city long ago, they flung a bar of iron into the bay. Now, this bar 
shall float again on the waves of the Mediterranean Sea before we, the 
people of Marseilles, will consent to be slaves." 

The National Assembly, however, having decided on the 15th of 
July — that is, about three weeks after the king's return — that the 
monarchy should not be abolished, the hot-tempered men of Mar- 
seilles went about their business ; but it became clear from that 
time what side they would take, when the great question of king or 
no king came to be decided. 

And, as we have seen, when the king in the next June refused to 
allow two decrees of Parliament, — one about the banishment of priests. 



THE MARSEILLESE. 89 

and the other about the levying of twenty thousand patriots for the de- 
fence of Paris, — a certain member, named Barbaroux, remembering 
the fiery temper of the deputation from Marseilles, wrote to the mayor 
of that city, and begged him to send to Paris "six hundred men 
who knew how to die " {qui savent mourir). 

The letter was carried in the leather post-bag by the slow-going 
diligence, and in due time reached Marseilles. The six hundred men 
who knew how to die came forth, and were duly enrolled and armed, 
and on the 5th of July they began their long march. The authorities 
of the town said to them, " March, and strike down the tyrant;" and 
with these orders they went their way, musket on shoulder and sword 
on thigh. They also dragged after them two pieces of cannon, not 
knowing what might happen. Many other men, bound on the same 
errand, were wending their way to Paris about this time, being invited 
by the National Assembly, who contemplated the holding of another 
such gathering as we saw before in the Champ de Mars, when there 
were such preparations and such rejoicing. But while those went by 
twos and threes or twenties or thirties, it was Marseilles alone which 
sent forth a little army of " six hundred men who knew how to die." 

On this mass of Southern fire and valor the eyes of all men 
were soon fastened. It was for them that the wonderful tune called 
" The Marseillaise " was composed and set to suitable words. The 
happy composer of this most noble song was a certain colonel, named 
Rouget de Lisle, who long survived the stormy period of the Revolu- 
tion, and w^ho was alive as late as 1836. Those. of our readers who 
have never heard this tune, or have heard it without knowing the 
story of its composition, should %^t some good pianoforte-player to 
play it, and then let them say whether it is not a tune to " make the 
blood tingle in their veins," as Carlyle says. 

The " six hundred men who knew how to die " left Marseilles, as 
we have said, on the 5th of July. On the 14th was the feast on the 
Champ de Mars, but the Marseillese were not in time for that. It was 



90 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

a sad feast, unworthy of the name. The place was bright with sun- 
shine, and the people were there in abundance, and the king went, 
and there were trees of liberty and bands of music ; but as for Louis, 
no man said, " God bless him ! " The popular man of the hour was 
Petion, the Mayor of Paris, who had been dismissed by the king's 
friends and restored again. Chalked on men's hats were the words 
" Vive Petion ! " " Petion or Death ! " Some were afraid that the king 
would be murdered ; and he himself was not without fear of it, for 
he went to the Champ de Mars with bullet-proof armor under his 
waistcoat. 

On the 2 2d of July, being Sunday, the Assembly proclaimed the 
country to be in danger. The same sad story, " La patrie est en 
danger ! " was emblazoned on a large banner, and it was cried aloud 
by heralds with sound of trumpet. And now, in spite of the royal " veto " 
upon enlistment of volunteers, and in answer to the mournful tidings 
" Our country is in danger! " hundreds of young men might be seen 
that Sunday afternoon enrolling their names in a book in every sec- 
tion of Paris. As each volunteer signed his name, there was a shout 
of " Vive la patrie ! " and sounds of weeping from some who were re- 
jected because they were too small. In a day or two ten thousand 
were on their way to Soissons, where a camp was formed. 

On July 25 the Duke of Brunswick, with thirty thousand foot and 
ten thousand horse, struck his tents, and marched on Paris. He had 
many emigrants in his ranks. He said in his proclamation what he 
meant to do for France. He meant to restore the king, and to hang 
everybody who resisted him, and to reduce Paris, if she would not 
submit, to a heap of rubbish. 

This proclamation inflamed the minds of the French people yet 
more, and made them resolve to do what they had to do with all their 
might. 

It was now felt by all patriots that the time had come to pluck the 
king from his place, and put him under lock and key or in the silent 




YOUNG MEN ENROLLING THEIR NAMES. 



THE MARSEILLESE. 



93 



tomb. He was, as they thought, the cause of this invasion of their 
country ; and there is no doubt that an insurrection on a large scale 
was now being organized in Paris with as much secrecy as possible. 
It was, however, not to take place until after the arrival of the " six 
hundred who knew how to die." These men had been marching day 
by day upon the dusty roads of France ever since the 5th of July, and 
they were now drawing nigh the " tyrant " whom they had been sent 
to " strike down." As the crow flies, Paris may be distant from Mar- 
seilles about four hundred and eighty miles ; by road it is more. On 
the 29th of July the six hundred were at Charenton, where several 
leading patriots met them, and where they were entertained with 
a dinner at the Blue Dial. On the 30th they made a grand 
public entry into Paris, and were met by the Jacobin Club in a body 
on the site of the fallen Bastille. Having with some diiBculty forced 
their way through the crowded streets, they reached the Hotel de 
Ville, where Mayor Petion welcomed them and received their mus- 
kets. They then marched on to a tavern, where a plain repast was 
prepared for them. 

This dinner was not fated to be eaten in peace, for the arrival 
of the six hundred was noised abroad, and, of course, much detested 
by the Royalists. A certain loyal body of National Guards, formed 
of rich and respectable men from a wealthy quarter of Paris, hap- 
pened to be on guard at the Tuileries the same day ; and these 
men, or part of them who were off duty for a while, chanced to 
be dining not far from the tavern where the six hundred were about 
to dine. These Nationals had dined, and were strolling about, when 
they were hooted by some of the mob who had followed the Mar- 
seillese. Words begat blows ; and as some of the Nationals drew their 
swords, the mob cried out, " Help, men of Marseilles ! " The six hun- 
dred had not yet sat down to their meal, and, hearing the cries, they 
opened the tavern windows, and leaped out, drawing their swords at 
the same time. The Nationals, not liking the looks of such fierce 



94 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

fellows, retired, at first face to face with the foe, but, finding this would 
not do, they wheeled round and fled. Quick over the Tuileries draw- 
bridge or into the muddy ditch they sprang. One man, too stout to 
fly, got a blow from the flat of a sword ; others were cut or pricked in 
the back; and another, who had twice fired a pistol at his pursuers and 
missed them all, was run through and died on the spot. Such sad 
events happened on the first day spent by the six hundred in Paris. 
They evidently knew how to kill as well as how to die. 

The great crisis was clearly drawing nigh. More and more loudly 
came the clamor for deposing the king. The galleries of the Assem- 
bly were now crammed with excited women, or men waving swords, 
and interrupting the debate with shouts of " Depose the king ! " 

On the 3d of August the Mayor Petion and all the Council 
came and openly petitioned for it ; every patriot wished it, and the 
Assembly could do nothing until they had promised to consider the 
question on the 9th of the same month. 

On Sunday, the 5th, the king held a levee at the Tuileries. It was 
his last ! Never for a long time had one been so crowded. Out- 
side the palace, within a few steps, the restless city was all astir, de- 
manding in every street the deposition of the king. Inside, a last, 
but fruitless attempt was being made to carry the king away to Rouen ; 
but the undecided monarch would not seize his last chance of escape. 

" No," said he ; "I believe the insurrection is not so near as you 
think." 

But he was fatally mistaken, as we shall see. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE SWISS GUARD. 

IT will be remembered that the palace of the King of France was 
guarded by a thousand Swiss soldiers. These men were well 
drilled, brave, and faithful ; and even in the raging sea of disloyal Paris 
the monarch felt secure, — too secure, as it proved. The Swiss do not 
seem to have meddled with the politics of the day, but to have done 
their duty, earned their paltry pay, and kept to themselves. 

We have already noticed the king's Sunday levee, and the futile 
efforts which his friends made to get him removed to Rouen. These 
he would not second; "for," said he, "the insurrection is not so near 
as you suppose." But it was near, very near now. In fact, the leaders 
of the Revolution had already determined that if the Assembly would 
not pronounce the dethronement of Louis on the next Thursday, they 
w^ould rise and do it by force of arms. 

But the Assembly were busied about Lafayette, who had denounced 
the Jacobins, by a letter, as dangerous people ; his conduct was there- 
fore discussed for several days, and on Wednesday he was acquitted 
of blame by a majority of two to one. 

Thursday evening arrived, and no sentence of deposition had been 
pronounced. All that night men were arming and drilling, and making 
ready for an attack on the Tuileries early the next m.orning. The loyal 
gentlemen of France were aware that something serious was about to 
happen ; and they gathered round their king, each man with his weapon 
of war. It was a very close night, and the palace windows were 
thrown open, for every room was densely crowded. About midnight 



96 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

those in the palace could plainly hear the " storm-bells " calling the 
people together in various parts of the city. One bell was the same 
which was rung by a king's order on St. Bartholomew's Eve, 1572, 
as a signal for the massacre of the Huguenots. Another bell which 
sounded in the night air was that of the Town-hall ; this was pulled 
by Marat, the editor of the " People's Friend," who had been impris- 
oned for what he had written. 

It must have been an awful night ; and yet as its ho,urs stole on 
and no armed mobs appeared, a joke was bandied from one to the 
other : " The tocsin is like a dry cow ; it does not yield any milk." 

During the night the king had a short nap, and about five o'clock 
he went out into the garden to review his troops, in company with old 
Marshal Maille, who was nearly eighty years of age. The soldiers did 
not seem very loyal, and their shouts of " Vive le Roi " ended in " Vive 
la Nation," — as if the king and nation were not one and the same, as 
they ought to be. 

When the sun began to shine, a countless army of men who had 
been gathering, each in his proper quarter during the night, united 
and moved in the direction of the Tuileries. At the head of all, in 
the place of honor, marched the " six hundred who knew how to die." 
There were squadrons drawn up to resist this army of the people, but 
none of them did anything except get quietly out of the road; so that 
the six hundred and the host which followed in their rear found no 
resistance until they arrived at the outer gate of the great courtyard 
of the palace, called the Place du Carrousel. 

If Louis had been a general, like Napoleon, or even if he had been 
a resolute prince like Charles the First, he might have made a good fight 
of it, and even carried the day. It is said that the queen offered him 
a pistol and said, " Now, if ever, it is the time for you to show yourself 
a hero." But Louis was not a fighting man. He did not lack courage,, 
but he lacked the resolution to strike one great blow for his ancient 
crown. There he sat in this awful hour doing nothing; his hands 



THE SWISS GUARD. 97 

were on his knees, and his head bent low. The troops in the court 
sent in for orders. " Are we to fire the cannon on the people or not ? " 
No orders were sent out to them ; so they threw down their lighted 
matches. There was no head ; no quick, sharp word of command ; 
no orders promptly given and as promptly obeyed. A few minutes 
after eight o'clock the king decided on leaving the palace and taking 
refuge in the Assembly. He left his gallant gentlemen and his red- 
coated Switzers to fight or yield, to fly or die, as they liked or could. 
There they were left; and they turned their reproachful looks on the 
monarch who had abandoned them, until he and his queen and chil- 
dren were lost to sight in the crowd. The gentlemen slipped away as 
well as they were able by one door or another, and the unfortunate 
Swiss Guard stood to their arms and waited what might happen like 
brave men. They were soon face to face with the six hundred, and 
then there was a short parley. 

" Where is the king ? " 

" He has gone over to the Assembly." 

" We have come here to take possession of his house until the 
Assembly pronounces him deposed." 

And then what were the Swiss Guard to do or say, the king 
having gone ? Were they to defend the empty palace or not } While 
pausing undecided, there was a discharge of cannon, and the balls 
struck the roof of the Tuileries. This seems to have decided the 
Swiss captain. " Fire ! " said he. 

His men did so; and not a few Marseillese lay stretched on the 
earth, dead or dying, the next moment. The volley was so sudden 
and well-directed, and the appearance of the serried ranks of the Swiss 
so terrible, that the huge mob recoiled, and backed out of the great 
court, and the Swiss advancing seized the cannon and prepared to use 
them in their own defence. 

The " six hundred who knew how to die " soon rallied, however, 
and returned to the charge ; and the National Guards in the garden 

7 



gS STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

also fired on the Swiss as foreigners while they were attempting, 
though without success, to discharge the cannon. Had they suc- 
ceeded in firing off those great guns, the cause of the king might 
not have been lost. But even though they could not manage the 
cannon, they fired their muskets with deadly precision, and killed very 
many people. Bonaparte himself was a witness of this battle, and he 
believed that the Swiss would have won the day if they had had a 
capable general. , ^ 

When this bloody struggle was at its height, a written order of the 
king was carried by some daring messenger to the Swiss to cease firing. 
But why did he not also order the mob to cease firing } The poor 
Swiss obeyed the order and fired no more, but were fired at as hotly as 
ever. What were they now to do ? The people had become mad- 
dened Hke bears bereft of their whelps, for they saw bleeding and 
dying patriots carried along the streets ; and the Swiss felt sure if they 
laid down their arms and ventured into the crowd they would be torn 
to pieces in a moment. Yet something must be done, and. at once; 
so they broke up into detachments, and tried to make their way to 
places of safety. 

One party was utterly destroyed ; another rushed into the National 
Assembly, and found a refuge there ; a third, three hundred strong, 
made for the Champs Elysees and Courbevoye, where there were 
other soldiers of their nation. But very few of them escaped ; they 
died fighting here and there. Fifty were marched to the Hotel de 
Ville ; but they were massacred on the way, every one. The Marseil- 
lese, like brave men, tried to save the Guard after the victory was won ; 
but the Paris mob were cruel, and thirsted for the last drop of the 
Swiss soldiers' blood. 

This murder of unresisting men, who had simply done the duty 
they were paid to do, is a very dark blot on the character of the people 
of Paris. It shows them in a very unfavorable light. But to our 
minds it is also a great blot on the king's character; for he forsook his 




THE SWISS GUARD FIRING ON THE MARSEILLESE. 



THE SWISS GUARD. lOI 

brave defenders, and then, by sending an order to cease firing, he 
became, though without meaning it, their destroyer. They were paid 
sixpence a day for defending his house, and when it was attacked they 
acted as true soldiers only could and would have acted ; and in obey- 
ing the king's orders to cease firing, they became martyrs to the 
high cause of soldierly discipline. Near Lucerne there is a monu- 
mental lion, the work of a first-rate sculptor, which has been erected in 
memory of these brave men. 

The scenes inside the Tuileries were shocking and hardly to be 
described. Outside, one hundred and eighty bodies of dead Swiss 
guardsmen were piled in one ghastly heap ; while more than a hun- 
dred carts, piled up with dead patriots, went sorrowfully away from 
the scene of bloodshed to the cemetery of Sainte Madeleine. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES. 

\ FTER the sack of the Tuileries and the destruction of the Swiss 
JLJL Guard, the king and his family were sent in Mayor Petion's 
carriage, not to the palace of the Luxembourg, but to the tower of the 
Temple, a very gloomy-looking place indeed. Here the king was 
kept under close observation, and was subjected to many indignities 
which he must have felt very keenly. How often now he must have 
wished that he had got away from Paris when such a thing was pos- 
sible ! But he may yet have cherished a hope of being rescued by the 
Duke of Brunswick and the Austrians. The kings of the countries 
round about France were highly incensed at the treatment of their 
brother Louis, and the King of Prussia drew his sword to rescue him 
from the clutches of the fierce patriots of Paris. 

The month of September, 1792, was a very remarkable one. 
Two things are especially to be noticed in it. One is the gallant 
manner in which the French people formed themselves into armies, 
and marched, full of cheerful courage, against the invaders of their 
country ;, the other is the murderous hate shown by those in the cities, 
especially Paris, against the upper classes, whom they regarded as the 
cause of all their troubles. Let us recall what was done in Paris in 
this month of September, 1792. On the motion of the president the 
Assembly was dissolved, and a new National Convention ordered to 
assemble ; and on Sunday, the 2d of September, the electors began to 
choose their deputies, to the number of seven hundred and forty-four, 
who were to meet at the Tuileries. 



THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES. 103 

Until they could get together, the country, now left without a 
government, was guided by the Paris municipals, or Commune, — all 
men of very revolutionary minds, dressed in tricolor sashes, passing 
a hundred decrees daily, sitting ever with food in their pockets and 
loaded pistols always at hand. There were Robespierre, Marat, and 
others, raging and foaming against the thirty thousand aristocrats of 
Paris. A new high court of justice was also organized by Danton, 
with four fiery men from each section. Four days after this court 
was set up, Dr. Guillotin's new instrument of death began its work. 
The first victim condemned by the new court and executed by the 
guillotine was the royalist Collenot d'Angremont. Others followed, 
and the appetite of Paris for horrors grew daily stronger. On the 
28th of August Danton came to the Commune, and asked for a decree 
to search every house in Paris for arms. He got his decree granted, 
and two thousand muskets were soon ferreted out, and, more than 
that, four hundred suspected persons were hurried off to one of the 
prisons. Guards were stationed at the end of every street, and the 
door of each house was broken open, if not opened willingly at the 
dread knock of Danton's officials. A great terror now fell on all 
the respectable classes of Paris, and every day saw the prisons 
getting fuller of Royalists. • 

Dumouriez was now the general of the army ; and such an army ! 
— mere raw recruits, almost beggars ! On Sunday, September 2, the 
news came of the arrival of the Duke of Brunswick at Verdun, with 
sixty thousand men. General Beaurepaire, who held Verdun, blew 
his brains out with a pistol, because the municipals bade him surren- 
der the place. 

The Duke of Brunswick had engaged to dine in Paris on a certain 
day, and the other kings and powers were advancing ; and France was 
in a state of terror, almost of despair. We must remember all this 
when we read of the September massacres. No one can find an 
excuse for murder ; but France, and especially Paris, was then as 



I04 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

nearly mad as a country can be, with great armies girding her round, 
and breathing out threats of what they meant to do when they came. 
What a Sunday that was ! — huge posters on the walls; storm-bells 
sounding ; men and women offering to shoulder musket and mount 
guard ! Then it was that Danton made one of his mighty speeches, 
which set every heart on fire. 

So far, so good. But what was Marat doing that Sunday, and 
cruel JBillaud, and others like-minded ? No man knows exactly ; but 
it is supposed they had much to do with the fearful scenes which soon 
afterward steeped this Sunday and the next few days in innocent 
blood. The infamous massacre of helpless victims began about three 
o'clock, and in this manner. A number of priests who would not 
take the oath were being carried in six coaches along the streets to 
the Abbaye Prison. Many people were standing about cursing the 
priests to their hearts' content, scowling and shaking their fists at 
them. Some of the more violent got on the carriage-steps and pulled 
down the window-blinds, which the priests had drawn up. One of 
the priests, a man of quick temper, struck one of the mob with a 
cane. This was a fatal act ; for as soon as it was done the carriages 
were stopped, and the priests dragged out into the street and brutally 
murdered, close to the prison gate. 

This was the beginning of the September massacres, which lasted 
from that Sunday afternoon until Thursday evening. The dreadful 
tragedy was enacted in .this manner. A rude court of justice was 
formed in every prison. Before this the prisoners were tried one after 
another. If they were declared innocent, they were set free with loud 
cries of " Vive la Nation ! " But if, as more frequently was the case, 
they were doomed by the court, they were liberated at the outer gate, 
but without the words " Vive la Nation ! " They were liberated, 
indeed, but to what ? " The condemned man was conducted," says 
the historian, *' into a howling sea, under an arch of wild sabres, axes, 
and pikes." He sank, hewn asunder. Then another sank, and an- 
other ; and there was a heap of corpses. 




M. DE SOMBREUIL'S DAUGHTER PLEADING FOR HER FATHER'S LIFE. 



THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES. 



107 



Among those who were thus murdered, let us single out one noted 
for her beauty and virtues, the Princess Lamballe. She had escaped 
to England at the time when the king made his attempt to get away 
in the summer of 1791 ; but she returned to die miserably just outside 
the Abbaye Prison. The princess had thrown herself upon a bed to 
rest, when one of the prison turnkeys came in and told her that she 
was to be removed to another place. 

" I am well enough here," said she ; " I do not wish to remove." 

" But you must." 

" Then," said she, " I will arrange my dress a little." 

" You will not have far to go," the jailer replied. 

The princess was led to the gate. She was not even tried, 
being so well known a friend of the queen. She was led to the awful 
gate and pushed forcibly into the street ; for at the sight of what was 
awaiting her, she shrank back with horror. But there was no help 
for her; she must go forward into the " howling sea, under the arch 
of wild sabres, axes, and pikes." Her head was cleft with the cruel 
axe, and her body was cut in pieces. Her head was then fixed on a 
pike and carried before the windows of the Temple, that the queen 
might see it and be agonized at the sight. 

Old Monsieur de Sombreuil had a daughter. She pleaded for him 
in so touching a manner that he was spared ; but one horrible condi- 
tion was made, — she had to drink aristocrats' blood, to show that she 
and her father hated aristocrats. 

Several very thrilling accounts were written by men who were then 
in one of the prisons, and who were among the saved ones. Carlyle 
has given us some account of three of these men ; namely, the Abbe 
Sicard, Advocate Maton, and Jourgniac. Jourgniac's little book is 
called " The Agony of Thirty-eight Hours." He speaks of Sunday 
night in the Abbaye, and how they waited for death hour by hour, 
" gazing on the pavement of their prison, on which lay the moonlight 
checkered with the triple stanchions of the windows." At two o'clock. 



I08 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

he says: " The Abbe Lenfant and the Abbe de Chapt Rastignac ap- 
peared in the pulpit of the chapel which was our prison. They said 
to us that our end was at hand ; that we must compose ourselves, and 
receive their last blessing. We threw ourselves on our knees and 
received it. Half an- hour afterward they were both massacred, and 
we heard their cries." 

Maton says, among other things : " Baudin de la Chenaye was 
called. Sixty years of virtues could not save him. He passed the 
fatal outer gate, gave a cry of terror at the heaped corpses, covered his 
eyes with his hands, and died of innumerable wounds. About seven 
o'clock in the morning four men entered with bludgeons and sabres. 
Four sabres were crossed over my breast, and I was brought to their 
bar. The judge was a lame man, of tall, lank stature." 

Jourgniac gives us an account of the tribunal. The president, in 
a gray coat, with a sabre at his side, stood leaning with his hands on 
a table. Some ten persons were around, seated or standing ; and two 
men in bloody shirts guarded the door of the place. While I was 
being tried, a prisoner was brought in. It was one. priest more whom 
they had ferreted out of the chapel. After a very few questions they 
said, " A la Force." The priest flung his breviary on the table, and 
was driven out and massacred. Jourgniac got off, and so did Maton 
and Sicard ; but one thousand and eighty-nine were murdered, and 
carts went along the streets, filled with human corpses to be buried 
in the cemeteries. Of these victims two hundred and two were 
priests. When Danton was taken to task about these and other hor- 
rors under his authority as Minister of Justice, he said, " Are they not 
guilty ? " and turned his back on the speaker. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE ENEMY AT BAY. 

DUMOURIEZ, now the leader of the French armies, was a brave 
and able soldier. On the night of August 28 he assembled a 
council of war at his lodgings at Sedan, and spread a map of France 
on the table.. He heard all that his officers had to say ; most of 
them advising him to retreat to Paris, where something might happen 
for his advantage. Dumouriez thanked them all, and wished them 
a good-night ; then he called to his private room a certain young 
officer named Thouvenot. 

" See there," said he to Thouvenot, as he pointed to the map of 
France ; " that is the forest of Argonne, a long stretch of rocky 
mountain and wild wood, with but five, or perhaps only three passes 
through it. Might we not seize them ? " 

On the 29th Dumouriez left Sedan for the forest, and did seize 
those passes forthwith. 

The month of September was one of the wettest on record ; and 
the country through which the army of Brunswick toiled toward Paris 
— a diificult country at all times — was made much more so by reason 
of the bad weather. The long chain of the Argonne forest stretching 
forty miles, with but five passes at the most, all occupied by French 
soldiers, presented a natural rampart which the invaders could not 
break through. Each pass was blocked with felled trees, and held 
by desperate men ; and how to surmount that obstacle the Bruns- 
wickers knew not. They tried several times, but failed always. The 
weather continued wretched, the wood was too green to burn, the 



no STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

sour grapes brought on dysentery, and the peasants of Champagne 
were, as was Hkely, very unfriendly, and killed a Brunswicker when- 
ever they could. There was only one way left by which the duke 
could get to Paris, and that was by going round the end of the moun- 
tain chain; and this he did, after losing twenty-five days in trying to 
force a way through the passes. He now brought his men face to face 
with the French. Dumouriez had much trouble with his raw recruits. 
Once there was a panic and a mutiny, as was very natural among 
young fellows who had just come from Paris. The general had to 
rate them very soundly, as not worthy of being called soldiers, but 
scoundrels. Yet these very men were being rapidly manufactured 
into the best soldiers of that age, — men who, under the orders of the 
famous captains of the Republic, were ready to go anywhere and do 
anything. 

In the camp of the Duke of Brunswick there was a certain great 
author named Goethe. He came with a small body of men from 
Weimar, and he has left behind him his opinions of cannon-balls and 
such-like things. He likens the sound of cannon-balls to that of the 
humming of tops or the whistle of birds ; and he says that under fire 
you feel as if you were in some very hot place. 

On the 20th of September Kellermann, the second in command 
under Dumouriez, engaged the Brunswickers in a battle, which raged 
near the mill of Valmy till seven o'clock. Kellermann's horse was 
killed, and a powder-magazine blown up, and the enemy thought it a 
good time to attack ; but the " little rascals " of Paris, raw and ragged 
though they might be, stood like rocks, and shouted, " Vive la Patrie ! " 
and the well-drilled and well-armed foe had to retire in great surprise. 

There was a place beyond Metz called Thionville, which at the 
same time was fiercely battered and besieged, but the people there 
were equally brave and determined. They made a wooden horse and 
set him on the battlements of their city, and they hung a bundle of 
hay before his nose, and they wrote an inscription in large letters. 




THE WOODEN HORSE ON THE BATTLEMENTS OF THIONVILLE. 



THE ENEMY AT BAY. II3 

SO that the enemy could read it afar off : " When I have eaten my hay, 
then you will take Thionville." 

On the day of the battle at Valmy the new National Convention 
met in the " Hall of the Hundred Swiss " at the forsaken Tuileries, 
and proceeded to decree that same afternoon some revolutionary 
decrees, one of which was this : " Royalty from this day is abolished 
in France." When the news of this decree reached the French soldiers 
in Argonne, they stuck their caps on their bayonet-points and shouted 
*' Vive la Republique ! " till the welkin rang again with the noise. 
The Brunswickers and their allies now retired from the contest, and 
raised the sieges of Thionville and Lille. At the siege of the latter 
place the queen's sister, an Austrian archduchess, was present ; and 
the artillery officers, being eager to oblige her with a sight of what 
great guns can do, overcharged some mortars, which burst and killed 
thirty men. The Austrians rained balls and bombs on Lille, the latter 
being filled with oil of turpentine ; and they aimed their fire chiefly at 
the houses of the poor, and spared the rich quarter as much as they 
could. Many houses in Lille were set on fire, but the poor people 
nimbly ran about with pails of water helping one another. A certain 
barber of ready wit caught up a fragment of a splintered bomb, made 
a shaving-dish of it, and shaved fourteen people on the spot. 

Lille would not yield, nor Thionville, nor would the raw levies be 
driven from their posts in the Argonne mountains. Goethe, who, as 
we have said, was with the invaders, has left us a history of this 
campaign, from which it seems that on the nth of October the 
invading army retreated from Verdun. The poet says : " It was like 
Pharaoh going through a red sea of mud ; for here also lay broken 
chariots, and riders and foot seemed sinking around." His own car- 
riage could not move, because of an unbroken column of sick-wagons 
which trod the town streets into a morass. The wet weather and the 
bad food had laid many low with dysentery and fever. At last 
Goethe's servant managed to shove his master's carriage into a row 



114 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

of wagons, and they went on, though at a funeral pace. Outside the 
town there was a narrow road with a ditch on the right and left. Just 
before him there was an ammunition wagon drawn by four horses. 
One horse fell, and the drivers cut the traces and let it lie. As the 
other three horses could not drag the ponderous machine along, they 
also were cut loose, and the wagon was overturned in the ditch. 
Goethe's carriage was driven right over the poor fallen horse, and he 
says, " Isaw only too well how its legs, under our wheels, -went crash- 
ing and quivering." 

The meadows were " rained to ruin," and the foot-paths everywhere 
lost sight of. In the ditches and fields were dead horses enough, and 
sometimes they were flayed and the fleshy parts cut away, — sad tokens 
of the distress the army was in. 

At Estain, which Goethe reached at noon, there was an endless 
tumult in the market-place. " All sorts of walkers, soldiers in uniform, 
marauders, sorrowing citizens and peasants, women and children, 
crushed and jostled one another amid vehicles of all sorts." While 
the Duke of Brunswick was thus retreating with dishonor from the 
task he had set himself to do, the lucky Dumouriez went to Paris to 
announce his success to the National Convention. He was a wiry 
man, of that iron cast we sometimes see, a man who was never 
tired, — " The creature of God and my sword," as he styled himself. 
He had once been foreign minister, but threw up his seal of office 
when Louis set his veto on the two decrees ; and when Lafayette, 
seeing the king's cause lost, rode over the marches into Holland, 
the command was given to Dumouriez. He was well received in 
Paris, as he deserved to be, and was feasted by the citizens in 
grand style. 

One night, however, as he was in the drawing-room of Talma, the 
great actor, Marat came to him unbidden and said, " I have come from 
the Jacobin Club to ask you why you did not pursue Brunswick with 
more energy." 



THE ENEMY AT BAY. II5 

The general turned his eyes coldly on the lean, wretched-looking 
Jacobin, and said with disdain, " Ah, you are he whom they call 
Marat ! " 

The very name made the company shudder; for Marat was known 
to be a man who had advised the murder of all the aristocrats, in 
France, and who would have hired assassins to butcher Talma, or 
Dumouriez, or any of the guests there assembled, had he thought 
their removal needful for the rolling on of the great Revolution to 
the place he had fixed in his own mind. 



CHAPTER XVII. 



THE TRIAL OF KING LOUIS XVI. 



WE now come to a very sad and painful event in the Revolution, 
the trial and subsequent execution of the king. Who does 
not feel sorry for him ? Born the heir to so much human glory, yet 
brought step by step to so much shame and sorrow. 

There was now no king nor kingdom of France. The king was 
now no longer King Louis XVI., but plain Louis, or Louis Capet. 
The National Convention of seven hundred and forty-nine men, who 
first met about the middle of September, were now the sovereigns of 
France by might if not by right ; able to raise or lower whom they 
would, to kill or save alive as they pleased. One of the first labors of 
the new Convention was to have a guard ; the next was to bring to 
judgment those guilty of the September massacres. The guard was 
ordered, and then it was repealed ; for it was considered an insult to 
Paris that a republican convention should need any protection from 
the people whom it so truly represented. As to the massacres, noth- 
ing was done to bring the guilty ringleaders to the gallows, though 
much was said and attempted. Things of greater importance than 
that of avenging dead men pressed upon the Convention : there was 
the army to quarrel over ; there was the question how to feed the 
people of Paris ; and above all, there was the question, " What is to be 
done with Louis ? " 

Much anxiety was there about the army ; for the European powers 
were highly indignant with France for putting her king in chains, and 
it was thought that England would join Prussia and Austria in his 



THE TRIAL OF KING LOUIS XVI. II7 

defence. The French army, or armies, were in a bad way, and one 
member complained that thirty thousand pairs of breeches were 
urgently needed by the army of the South. 

As for food, it was scarcer than ever, and bread riots occurred 
almost everywhere. Marat tells us, in his " People's Friend," that 
a pound of bread cost six sous, and a laborer's daily wages were 
but fifteen. One member proposed that every man should live two 
days a week on potatoes, and also that every person should hang his 
dog. Two of the members went one day to Chartres to arrange 
matters about food, and the people threatened to hang them unless 
they would then and there fix the price of corn to suit the pockets of 
the Chartres mob. And all this hunger, and these long queues of 
men at baker's shops, — what did they end in ? The murder of the 
king ! The queue was, as we have already said, a long line of people 
who stood one behind another, at the baker's door. At first there 
was a rope fastened to a ring in the shop wall which each person 
grasped with his hand; but the rope was often cut by mischief-makers, 
and the Convention ordered the ropes to be replaced by iron chains. 

Hunger pressed on the French people still ; and their overthrow 
of the old order of things had as yet done little or nothing to satisfy 
the poor with bread. People kept asking the question, " Why is food 
still so dear ? " And the answer came, " Because Louis is still alive. 
We shall have no real freedom nor plenty until he is put out of the 
way." As long as he lived, he seemed to them a centre round which 
gathered plots and royalist hopes, and they thought that it should be 
but a short step from the Tuileries to the Place de la Revolution. 

When a certain curate, Gregoire, who had become a bishop, de- 
clared from his pulpit that it was a capital crime to be a king at all, 
and his words were applauded as words of wisdom, we may under- 
stand what the thoughts of men were on that subject. Moreover, the 
eyes of Frenchmen were now suddenly turned to the pages of English 
history, and especially to that part of it which tells of the execution of 



Il8 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Charles I. Printed copies of the trial of Charles were sold in vast 
numbers, and the French could but reason thus : " If the English 
put their king to death, and have become since the first of free na- 
tions, why may not we do the same? " And so, among the questions 
debated in the Convention, this question, " What is to be done with 
the king ? " became the foremost, and was the one most frequently 
discussed by the members. 

The 6th of November was an important day for France. Her 
general, Dumouriez, won the battle of Jemappes, his soldiers singing, 
as they conquered the foe, the "Marseillaise Hymn ;" and her Par- 
liament decreed that Louis, her late king, should be brought to 
trial. 

There was a body of members in the Convention who looked on 
the king's trial and what it might lead to with keen dislike. These 
were the Girondins. They had done much to carry on the Revolu- 
tion up to this point ; but now they often differed from men like Dan- 
ton, Marat, and Robespierre, and many and hot were their disputes 
about the further progress of state affairs. 

The king's trial was much affected by a discovery in the Tuileries. 
A certain blacksmith of Versailles, named Gamin, came one day be- 
fore the Convention, and said that he had helped Louis make an iron 
press, which . was placed in a wall of the king's chamber. He was 
able to point out the iron press behind some wainscot or tapestry ; and 
the press, having been wrenched open, disclosed a number of im- 
portant state letters, which brought trouble to many a man. In 
consequence of this the bust of Mirabeau was shattered, and several 
men of importance became suspected and unpopular. The black- 
smith, who said the king had nearly killed him with a drugged glass 
of wine after the safe was securely fixed, had a large reward for his 
services, and the letters and papers found in the iron chest were pro- 
duced as so many witnesses of the king's guilt. 

On the nth of December the king was brought in the mayor's 




" IT IS A PITY TO WASTE BREAD IN TIME OF DEARTH. 



THE TRIAL OF KING LOUIS XVI. 12 1 

carriage to the Convention hall to be tried. The streets were full of 
soldiers, and the people were silent, or now and then sang snatches 
of the popular Ca ira or the " Marseillaise Hymn," as he went by. 
When he was in the hall, he looked around at those who were to 
judge him ; and the president, who had fifty-seven questions to ask 
him, said, " Louis, you may sit down." 

After Barrere had asked his fifty-seven questions, and Louis had 
answered them all as well as he could, he was ordered to withdraw 
into a committee-room, where he partook of a crust of bread. A clerk 
who was in the room having thrown some bread into the street, Louis 
reproved him, saying, " It is a pity to waste bread in time of dearth." 

" My grandmother," observed Chaumette (a man then high in the 
government), "used to say to me, 'Little boy, never waste a crumb 
of bread, for you cannot make one.' " 

" Monsieur Chaumette," replied the king, " your grandmother seems 
to have been a sensible woman." 

Louis's trial now coming on, he was allowed to choose an advocate ; 
and three lawyers stepped forth to defend him ; namely, Tronchet, an 
old man called Malesherbes, and the youthful Deseze. 

It was arranged, after much debating, that Louis should again 
appear and plead on the day after Christmas Day. His advocates 
thought it too early, but they could not get the day postponed. So, 
at the cold dark hour of eight in the morning on St. Stephen's Day, 
the members of the Convention were at their post, and at nine o'clock 
Louis entered the hall to be tried, under an escort of National Guards. 

The talented young Deseze did the best he could for his master. 
For three hours he pleaded ; and when his great effort w^as over, Louis 
fell on his neck and kissed him. Before he left the place of trial the 
king also said a few words ; and they were the last he ever spoke in 
public, except two or three on the scaffold. He assured his judges 
that he was guiltless of the blood shed on the loth of August; and 
then he quitted the hall, leaving his fate in the hands of those who 



122 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

had made themselves his judges. After many further debates it was 
agreed that the Convention should decide, by a majority of votes, 
whether Louis was or was not guilty of conspiring against liberty, 
and, if so, what his punishment should be. When, at length, on the 
15th of January, the question was put, " Guilty or not guilty .?" all 
voted " Aye," except twenty-eight, who did not vote at all. 

The next vote was taken on the question, "What shall the punish- 
ment be } " The voting lasted from Wednesday, January -16, until the 
following Sunday morning. Each member had to mount, when his 
name was called, into the tribune, and say his say. Some voted for 
" death ; " others for " banishment." At length " death " was decided 
on by a majority of fifty-three. Then came a final question, " When is 
he to die ? " Every member had to mount the tribune again and give 
his vote. It was this final voting which did not come to an end until 
three o'clock on the Sunday morning. By a majority of seventy the 
question was decided, " No delay ; death within twenty-four hours ! " 

They say that these votings formed the strangest of all the strange 
scenes of the Revolution. One deputy who had voted for death 
without delay, ran out of the hall to get some dinner in the Palais 
Royal ; and as he was paying for it, a man stepped up to him, and said, 
" You voted in the king's business, did you not.? " . 

" Yes," replied the deputy; " I voted death." 

" Wretch, take that! " said the man ; and the voter received a stab 
which caused his death i^i a few hours. 



F 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE EXECUTION OF THE KING. 

ROM the time that he decided to leave the Tuileries, and his 
brave Swiss Guard, and the gallant gentlemen who had come to 
fight for him, Louis became a mere puppet in the hands of the Paris 
municipal officers. He might have made a better fight for his crown, 
no doubt, but he was a quiet, peace-loving man, who shrank from 
bloodshed, and no doubt he did what he thought was for the best. It 
was a very bad best for him, though, to be cooped up, and his queenly 
wife as well, in a grim old tower, with thick walls and iron-grated little 
windows, where he could neither eat nor read nor write without some 
impudent fellow watching him. Was ever man so the football of a 
fickle fortune ? 

There was, however, one blessedness in his lot. His sorrows did 
not last long. The men who at that time ruled France soon dis- 
missed their victims. Robespierre and Marat had this grace about 
them, — they were for a speedy death ; and that is surely better than 
twenty or thirty years' imprisonment in a noisome dungeon without fire 
or candle. Louis had the ordinary comforts of life during his abode 
in the tower; but he was wounded in his spirit, day after day, by in- 
sults, which to a finely strung mind are worse than the pains of death. 
He was separated from his wife and children, and had but one friend 
to whom he could talk ; and that was his valet, Clery, who has left be- 
hind him a truthful account of his poor master's imprisonment and 
last hours on earth. 



124 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

The Revolution was, without doubt, dead against kings and 
queens, and it had a delight in stripping royalty of its robes ; but 
royalty showed itself dignified, nay, even grand, when stripped. Never 
did Louis appear more kinglike than in his last mournful hours. 

When the Convention had decreed that he was to die so soon, the 
Minister of Justice was sent to the tower that Sunday about noon, or 
a little after, with the dreadful news. He said, when he was going, 
" What a frightful task for a man to have to do ! " 

When Louis heard that he had to die so soon, he begged hard for 
a respite of three days in which to prepare for his end ; but they turned 
deaf ears to his prayer. He also asked for the consolations of religion, 
and this request was mercifully granted. The Abbe Edgeworth was 
sent to administer to his dying king all the ghostly comfort he could, 
and the last rites of the Church as well. The valet Clery has given 
us many affecting memorials of the closing scenes in the life of his 
master, whom he truly loved. The king's apartments were a sitting- 
room and bedroom, and a small circular closet which he used as a 
place of prayer. It was round, from being in a round turret at a cor- 
ner of the large square tower. The top was finished off outside with 
a roof shaped like the extinguisher of a candle. Here lived the de- 
throned Louis from August, 1792, until the 21st of January, 1793, 
when his feeble light of life was suddenly put out by the sharp edge 
of the axe. 

On the Sunday evening, at half-past eight, he had his farewell 
meeting with his wife and family, who descended from the chamber 
above by a winding stone stair in one of the round turrets. It was a 
most affecting scene, — that last interview between the doomed king 
and his heartbroken family. It lasted an hour and three quarters, and 
was seen by Clery and the officials through a glass panel in the door. 
They could not, however, hear a word that passed. The king was 
seated, with the queen on his left hand, and Madame Elizabeth, his 
excellent sister, on his right ; the Princess Royal was in front, and 




THE KING S FAREWELL MEETING WITH HIS FAMILY. 



THE EXECUTION OF THE KING. 127 

the little Prince stood between his father's knees. And so they (that 
forlorn family brought so low) spent the last Sabbath evening they 
were to be together in this world. When they tore themselves asun- 
der, the king promised that he would see them again early on the 
morrow, but he did not keep his word. When they left him that 
Sunday night, it was forever. 

The king slept well, Clery keeping watch in a chair, and the Abbe 
snatching a few hours of repose on the valet's bed. At five o'clock 
Clery lit the fire ; and the noise he made aroused the king, who got up 
and dressed himself. A dark January morning, cold and misty, hung 
over the city; but in that chilly gloom men by the hundred thousand 
were astir. One great event, and only one, was in everybody's mind. 
The city shops were kept shut, the city streets were empty ; no vehicle 
but one was allowed to move that morning in the highways of Paris. 
There was a drumming and the gathering of troops from a very early 
hour, and all the streets from the Temple to the Place de la Revolu- 
tion were lined with armed men. 

In the tower itself there was a solemn service held at half-past six 
that morning, which was probably the most real as it was the most affect- 
ing of any in the borders of Christ's kingdom that day. It was the 
dethroned king of France receiving his last sacrament. A chest of 
drawers formed the altar on this singular occasion. At eight o'clock 
the officers of justice came for him, and an hour afterward the sad 
procession left the tower. The king held a book of prayers in his 
hand, and fixed his eyes on it as the carriage rolled slowly along the 
hushed streets. The city was like a city of the dead, so silent was it 
then. Every one seemed awe-struck, as well he might be, by the 
spectacle of a people putting its king to death. 

At ten o'clock the carriage arrived at the Place de la Revolution. 
Did the king hope for a rescue? Did he hope that he might hear 
the cry of " Vive le Roi ! " and see a solid body of his friends burst 
through the lines of National Guards that surrounded the guillotine ? 



128 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Alas ! it was not so to be. At the Temple gate some pitiful women 
did lift up their feeble voices on his behalf ; but no man dared to cry, 
" God save him." If any one did feel anger or pity, he was afraid to 
show it; and so Louis went through a dumb city to his death, bewailed 
no doubt by many, but with none to strike a blow in his defence. 

When he stood on the scaffold, he began a speech, in which he 
had just time again to avow his innocence. Fearing lest his words 
might produce an upstir in his favor, the officer in command 
ordered the drums to be beaten, and the king's voice was drowned. 
The officer then said, " Executioners, do your duty ! " and six men 
seized Louis and bound him to a plank. The Abbe Edgeworth kept 
near, and just as the heavy axe was falling, said, " Son of Saint Louis, 
ascend to heaven ! " 

The executioner, whose name was Samson, lifted up the head, and 
held it out for the people to look at. Loud shouts of " Vive la 
Republique ! " arose ; and some of the people dipped their hand- 
kerchiefs, and others the points of their pikes, in the blood. " It is 
done ! it is done ! " cried the king's foes. It was indeed done, and 
could not be undone ; but it divided the friends and it united the 
enemies of the Revolution. 

The deputy who had been stabbed in the eating-house was buried 
on the Thursday after, with a great show of lamentation. The whole 
Convention in a body and the entire Club of the Jacobins were at the 
funeral. 

Many who had been ardent promoters of the Revolution were 
horrified at the murder of the king ; and especially the Girondins, who 
from that hour became the enemies of the more advanced men, and 
who, being the smaller and less popular party, were brought into the 
dust of death, as we shall see hereafter, though not before they had had 
a gallant but hopeless fight for their own principles of constitutional 
liberty. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE GIRONDINS. 

IF you examine a map of France, you will see a department on the 
west coast, near the city of Bordeaux, called Gironde. A party 
in the French Convention who (many of them, at least) came from 
that district were called Girondins. This party led the Revolution 
for a time ; but when the leaders of the mob became its leaders also, the 
Girondins, who were generally high-born gentlemen, saw that it would 
be an evil day when France was ruled by mob law. They therefore 
formed what we may call a Conservative party, and were hated accord- 
ingly by the rabid Republicans. The Girondins were for abolishing 
royalty, and yet not altogether for the murder of the king ; for though 
many of them did vote for his death, they yet tried to get a reprieve 
for him, but failed in the attempt. 

After the king was dead, the. Girondins became yet more and more 
opposed to the Jacobin leaders; and at length, on May 31, 1793, the 
Convention was surrounded by armed multitudes, who loudly de- 
manded the imprisonment of twenty-nine (or, as some say, thirty- 
three) deputies of the Girondin party. So these men, in obedience to 
the will of the mob, were kept under police observation ; and Madame 
Roland, a noble Frenchwoman, the wife of the late Minister Roland, 
was cast into prison. 

While they were thus in the strong grasp of the ruling party, Char- 
lotte Corday stabbed Marat fatally in his bath ; and this rash deed had 
probably much to do with the death of the Girondins generally. 
When Charlotte went on her errand to Paris, Barbaroux gave her a 

9 



130 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

note of introduction to the Girondin deputy Duperret ; and when 
Charlotte had succeeded in slaying Marat, Duperret was arrested, and 
the papers were examined. 

At Lyons the Girondin party, who were strong, put a Jacobin 
named Chalier to death. When Chalier was dying, he said that his 
death would cost the city dear; and his prophecy was fulfilled. 

Eleven of the Girondin deputies retreated to Bordeaux, dressed in 
the uniform of National Volunteers. Every place through which they 
passed bristled with dangers to them ; for in each town and village 
there was a Revolution Committee of a jealous temper, ever on the 
look-out for men who would not go their lengths. Louvet, one of the 
Girondins, has left an account of this retreat. He tells us how one of 
the party was tortured with the gout, how another was too fat for 
marching, and how a third had to walk on tiptoe; while Barbaroux 
(the same man who had written with tears in his eyes for " six hundred 
men who knew how to die " ) had to limp with a sprained ankle. So 
they jogged on, through perils and dangers, sleeping where they could, — 
now in the summer woods, now in a straw-shed. The country got so 
hot about them at last that they had to march only by night; and 
once, as they passed through a mean village, they heard the dread- 
ful words from some wakeful peasant, " There they are ! " and they 
glided off quickly through the darkness, over hedge and ditch, into 
the wood of Quimper, and there under the wet bushes crouched to- 
gether, and were found, in the morning by a kind-hearted pastor, who 
took them to his home and concealed them. Luckily for them, the 
Quimper folk were friendly to Girondins, and allowed them to hide 
themselves until a miserable little ship could be found to bear them 
away to Bordeaux. There they were landed, but they found it no 
place of safety. No ! Tallien and the Jacobins were there with their 
guillotine, cutting off the heads of all who dared to say a word against 
the now powerful party in the State. 

The prisons at Paris were crowded with occupants, and every day 




THE GIRONDINS DISCOVERED IN THEIR HIDING-PLACE. 



THE GIRONDINS. 133 

about the set of sun the death-carts went loaded with victims to the 
guillotine, which still did its dreadful work in the Place de la Revolu- 
tion. The Girondins, who had been since May under the charge of 
the police, were now thrown into prison, and had good reason to 
fear the worst. Twenty-two of them, all true Republicans and all 
eminent men, were in course of time placed on their trial before 
Fouquier Tinville, the famous attorney-general. 

Twenty-two Girondin members of the National Convention, who 
had been tried, were now to suffer death. It was the 30th of October, 
1793, or, according to the new Revolutionary calendar, the 9th of 
Brumaire, in the year 2 of the Republic. Anno Domini was now 
knocked on the head, and the old months of January, February, and 
so on ; for the Republicans, wanting everything new, constructed a 
brand-new almanac, which lasted fourteen years. 

On the 9th of the month Brumaire, therefore, of the year 2, the 
twenty-two Girondins were brought to the bar of Tinville, and con- 
demned to suffer the last dread penalty of revolution law. They were, 
remember, the flower of French patriots, all eloquent men, and great 
in their day; but now, suspected of a want of energy, they checked 
the glowing wheels of the great Revolution. After a lengthy trial, in 
which they defended themselves with surprising skill, the jury, by a 
fresh decree made for the purpose, declared the accused guilty, and 
they were sentenced to suffer the loss of life and of all their prop- 
erty. One of them, named Valaze, when he heard this wicked sen- 
tence, drew out a dagger and stabbed himself to the heart. The rest 
were taken back to prison, singing, as they went, the " Marseillaise 
Hymn." 

Another of them, named Vergniaud, had poison with him ; but he 
would not swallow it because he had not enough to kill his friends as 
well as himself. He therefore threw the poison away. The last 
night of the condemned Girondins was spent in a very strange man- 
ner. The fear of death does not seem to have affected their spirits in 



134 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

the least, for with songs and light-hearted mirth they met the " last 
enemy." 

A vast crowd of sight-seers were out when the Girondins went 
forth to die. It was something new and strange, surely, to behold the 
Revolution thus devouring her own children ; and many a man that 
day who saw them carted to the Place de la Revolution must have 
asked himself, " Who slew all these } " No rescue was attempted ; and 
the twenty-two died, man after man, shouting, " Vive la Repubhque ! " 
or singing the " Marseillaise Hymn " to the very last. 

There they perished, those twenty-two Girondins, while some of 
their party who escaped had, perhaps, a still more bitter fate to en- 
counter. Some of them were guillotined in Bordeaux. Barbaroux 
shot himself with a pistol ; while Buzot and Petion were found in a 
cornfield, their bodies half eaten by dogs. Louvet, after many dan- 
gers, happily escaped to Switzerland. Thus the Revolution began to 
devour her own children ; and the Girondins were not the last, thoudi 
they were among the best, whom she devoured. 



CHAPTER XX. 

CHARLOTTE CORDAY. 

OUR readers will understand by this time that there were at least 
two parties in the State who were bitterly opposed to each 
other. The Jacobins, or" Men of the Mountain," were out-and-out Re- 
publicans, bent on utterly destroying all the old landmarks of society, 
whether rank, property, or religion ; these men were the idols of the 
unthinking mob, and grew in power every day. The Girondins, how- 
ever, wanted a republic where property, order, and religion should be 
respected. We have seen how the Girondins were put down, — some 
being thrown into prison, and some obliged to flee from Paris to get 
out of the reach of their stronger rivals. 

A number of these men started a newspaper at Caen in opposition 
to the Jacobins ; and the cities of Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles were 
all minded at one time to march on Paris and put down the National 
Convention. Caen seems to have been a very warm centre of this 
anti-Jacobin spirit. Here no less than twenty-seven Girondins at one 
time lodged, and were entertained by those in authority ; and thence 
they launched their " Bulletin de Caen " at the heads of Marat, Robe- 
spierre, and others. 

At Caen there lived a young lady named Charlotte Corday. She 
was at the time she became famous about twenty-five years old, and 
very handsome. She' had conceived a violent hatred against the cruel 
Marat, and she resolved to kill him if she could, though she knew very 
well that her own life would be sacrificed in doing the deed. She told 
one of the Girondins, Barbaroux by name, that she was going to Paris 



136 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

on some private business ; and he gave her a letter to hand over to 
Duperret, one of the deputies in the National Convention. Charlotte 
set out from Caen on Tuesday, July 9, 1793, in the diligence, leaving a 
note for her father, in which she said that She had gone to England 
and he must forget her. 

The diligence was full ,of men who talked of nothing but politics, 
and who were all admirers of the Jacobin side. In this conversation 
Charlotte took no share. On Thursday, about noon, the coach 
rattled over the Paris pavements; and the adventurous young lady 
at once ordered a room at an inn, and went to bed. 

On Friday she delivered the letter to Duperret, and paid a visit 
to the Convention hall, for she wished to see what Marat was like. 
She took much notice of the " Men of the Mountain ; " but Marat 
was not among them : he was not well, but nursing himself at home. 
On Saturday morning Charlotte bought a large knife wherewith to 
stab her victim. Having ascertained that he was living at No. 44 in 
the Street of the School of Medicine, she ordered a cab and was driven 
to the door; but when she knocked the servant came and told her that 
Marat was sick and could not see her. Disappointed at this, she went 
back to her hotel, which was called the " Inn of Providence," and sat 
down and wrote a letter to Citizen Marat, in which she said she could 
enable him to do France a signal service. To this letter no reply was 
sent ; and she then wrote a second letter of a more pressing kind, and 
carried it herself to the house where Marat lived. 

It was about seven o'clock in the evening of July 13 when a 
cab might have been seen driven along that street, and at length 
stopping opposite No. 44. It was the eve of a great revolutionary fes- 
tival ; for on the 14th, four years ago, the people of Paris stormed the 
Bastille. On that day Marat had distinguished himself by his con- 
duct in the eyes of the mob, and from that day he had been growing 
in power. He was now, as we have said, ill, and nursing himself at 
home. At the very time when Charlotte Corday reached the house. 




CHARLOTTE CORD AY. 



CHARLOTTE CORDAY. I 39 

Marat was having a warm bath. He was waited on by a poor woman, 
and he had only about twenty cents in the house. He had not, there- 
fore, grown rich by the RevoUition ; and in that respect we cannot but 
admire the man, for no doubt he might have " feathered his nest " well 
by this time, had he been a covetous man. 

Charlotte was determined to see Marat, and argued with the woman 
at the door. " I must see Citizen Marat ; I can put it into his power 
to do France a great service." The woman was for shutting the door 
in Charlotte's face ; but Marat, hearing her earnest voice from his 
slipper-bath, bade the servant admit the visitor, and she was accord- 
ingly allowed to enter the house. The sick man told her to sit down 
and tell him what she came about. 

" I am from Caen," she said, " and I have matters of importance to 
tell you." 

" Well," said Marat, " and what are the traitors doing at Caen 
now ? Who are there ? " 

Charlotte told him the names of several, — Barbaroux, Petion, 
Louvet, Duchatel, and others. 

" Ah, they shall be guillotined within a fortnight," exclaimed the 
eager Marat ; and he took up his note-book, which lay on a three- 
legged stool close by, to write down their names. Charlotte carefully 
noted his actions ; and as his eyes were fixed on his notebook, and his 
nimble fingers were writing down the names Barbaroux, Petion, and 
Louvet, she drew out her bright new knife from its sheath, and drove 
it, with sure 'aim and with all the strength of her Norman right 
arm, deep into the heart of the " People's Friend." 

He could give only one cry, " Help, my dear ! " and then all was 
over. Marat was a dead man, and the Revolution had lost forever 
one of its ablest and perhaps, we may say, one of its purest leaders. 
For, bloody-minded as he was, he was not a selfish man ; he did not 
overturn thrones and kill aristocrats to enrich himself, but, as he sup- 
posed and wrongly supposed, to benefit a long-suffering nation of 
poor, struggling laborers. 



I40 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

It is quite impossible to imagine, still less to describe, the rage 
and terror which agitated the mighty heart of Paris that Saturday 
evening. One weak woman had suddenly leaped into world-wide 
notoriety, and had made the greatest city on earth reel to and fro as 
if there had been an earthquake. One deputy, pale as a sheet, rushed 
into the Convention, shouting out, " We are all going to be murdered ! " 

Paler yet lay the dead Marat ; but calm and cool, her pulses beat- 
ing quietly as ever, was the young woman who had treacherously and 
cruelly, and yet, as she believed, righteously, stabbed a man to death. 
The woman who came in at Marat's dying shriek ran out frantic, and 
alarmed every house in the street with her cries ; and in a few minutes 
the place was crowded, and Charlotte had to defend herself from their 
vengeance by placing herself behind some chairs and tables, until the 
soldiers arrived. She was then carried away to the Abbaye Prison, to 
await her trial. This took place on Wednesday, July 17, and did 
ncrt; last long ; for she said, " All these details [about the purchase of 
the knife, etc.] are needless. ... It was I who stabbed Marat." And 
when Tinville asked her why she had done a deed so strange and 
terrible, she replied: " I killed him because of his crimes; I killed him 
to save a hundred thousand. I killed a wild beast, to give quiet to my 
distracted country." 

As she thus confessed her guilt and declared she was alone in it, 
nothing more was to be said or done except to order her condemna- 
tion to death that same Wednesday evening ; and about half-past 
seven she was led forth from her prison, habited as a murderess, in 
a red gown. The city, now well used to such painful sights, was more 
than ever crowded with people, who regarded her as she was carried 
to her doom with mingled feelings. Some saluted her as a martyr, by 
taking off their hats ; and others howled at her as a devil in human 
shape, who had put out one of the bright lamps of the Revolution. 

Beautiful, indeed, Charlotte Corday looked, on her way to the 
Place de la Revolution, and as calm and serene as a summer day. 



CHARLOTTE CORD AY. 141 

She died with unfaltering courage, with a smile on her face, and " her 
cheeks tinged with a blush of maidenly shame," caused by the exe- 
cutioner's stripping her fair neck of the handkerchief which was 
around it. 

She did the best she cduld for the peace of France in killing, as 
she thought, a wild beast ; but Marat, dead in that lawless manner, 
was worse for France than Marat living and legislating. Neverthe- 
less, it is a wonderful story of the energy and resolution which can 
sometimes find a lodging in a young woman's breast ; and while there 
is very much in her deed to condemn, there is also something we 
cannot but admire. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

MARIE ANTOINETTE. 

THIS celebrated and unfortunate queen was born at Vienna in 
November, 1755, being the daughter of the Emperor of Germany 
and Maria Theresa of Austria. In May, 1770, she was married to 
Louis the Dauphin, grandson of Louis XV. In 1774 she became 
Queen of France, She was a fair young queen, and she has been de- 
scribed by several as she appeared in the height of her prosperity and 
among all the noblest of the land. She was kindly disposed, helping 
the poor, adopting orphans, and so on. 

In 1777 she had a daughter, and after that a son. Her happiness 
was soon overclouded; for she fell into disrepute with the French 
people, and her hair grew gray with cares and sorrows. Her good 
name was blackened by falsehoods, and her beauty departed from her 
before its proper time. She often sat, even at Versailles, weeping in 
her inner apartments, feeling that she was hated as the evil genius of 
France. She had inherited, however, a strength and courage which 
stood her in good stead. 

During the terrible day of the insurrection of the women she alone, 
they tell us, wore a face of courage, a look of lofty calmness, as if she 
were one who dared to do what she felt she ought to do. 

On that 6th of October, when the king had showed himself on the 
balcony of Versailles to the mob, she went out too, with her boy and 
girl in either hand. " No children," cried the voices ; and so she 
gently pushed them back, and stood there alone, with her hands 
crossed on her bosom. General Lafayette took her hand, and, making 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 



143 



a low obeisance, kissed it ; and then the people shouted, or some of 
them did, " Vive la Reine ! " An officer, named Weber, declares that 
he saw one of the rough fellows levelling his musket at her, when 
another angrily struck it down. 

Marie Antoinette's father was a Prince of Lorraine, and she ever 
had a drawing of her heart toward the people of that province. 
" Sire," said she to the king once, " these are some of your faithful 
Lorrainers," when some federates from that part were in Paris. She 
attracted the admiration of the great Mirabeau. In her he saw a 
courage like his own. " You do not know the queen," said he on 
one occasion; "her force of mind is prodigious: she is a man for 
courage." 

Woman-like, too, was she. When it was decided to make that un- 
fortunate flitting on the longest day of 1791, the queen must needs 
have a great stock of dresses made, which aroused suspicion ; and 
she spent some five hundred louis d'ors about her toilet-case in 
having it arranged and forwarded, and it was lost, after all. We have 
already seen how she, in her broad gypsy hat, leaning on a stupid man- 
servant's arm, took the wrong road as they issued from the Tuileries, 
and, instead of going to the left hand to the glass coach that was 
waiting, went to the right over the Pont Royal and the river, whereby 
a most precious hour was wasted, and, perhaps, all was lost ! We have 
seen, too, how the lumbering new berlin, with all the hapless royal 
family in it, was stopped at Varennes, and how they were all brought 
back with ignominy to a harsher captivity. 

The queen kept up a correspondence in cipher with the emigrants 
and friends of the monarchy at Coblentz, but she never could persuade 
the duller-witted Louis to come to any decision worthy of the name. 
When that singular procession, called that of the Black Breeches, in- 
vaded the Tuileries, she sat with her children and their aunt behind a 
barricade of furniture, weeping for very shame at the ruffianism which 
was allowed to go on unchecked in a king's house. When a woman 



144 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

offered her a red cap, which she took, and placed on her Httle boy's 
fair curls, the commandant, Santerre, who brewed, heer, said to her, 
"Madame, this people loves you more than you think." 

On the yet more awful morning of the loth of August, after a 
sleepless night, the queen stood with Madame Elizabeth, the king's 
sister, looking out of a window. " Sister," said Madame Elizabeth, 
" see what a beautiful sunrise ! " 

When the king was entreated to leave the palace and take refuge 
in the Assembly, some declare that the queen said, " As forme, I would 
be nailed to these walls sooner; " and she then offered her husband a 
loaded pistol, and bade him defend his home, for now or never was his 
time for doing it. Others deny the truth of these things ; but all 
admit that she behaved herself queen-like, and neither shrieked nor 
wept, but steeled herself to die, if she had to die, in a manner worthy 
of the great Theresa's daughter. 

It was said by some that the queen behaved with levity while the 
Tuileries was sacked and burning, and while the king and she, with the 
Princess Lamballe, were detained in the upper story of the Assembly 
Hall. They say that she and her friend looked out of the window, and 
laughingly shook the powder from their head-dresses on the people 
who were walking underneath. But if this were so, it was no laugh- 
ing matter soon after to be shut up in the Temple tower, and to see, 
as they say she saw or might have seen, the bleeding head of her dear 
friend the Princess Lamballe carried on a pike-point before her barred 
window. One municipal officer said, " Look out; " another, of a more 
pitiful disposition, said, " Do not look." 

During the melancholy autumn months the king was permitted, 
in company with his queen, to stroll in the garden of his prison at 
certain hours ; but the time came when this privilege was put an end 
to, and the afflicted pair were kept in. separate apartments. 

When the king had to die, in obedience to the decrfee of the Con- 
vention, his unhappy wife bade him farewell, as we have seen. Noth- 




MARIE ANTOINETTE BEING PRERARED FOR EXECUTION. 



MARIE ANTOINETTE. 1 47 

ing is more pathetic in the range of history than that good-by. The 
king met his doom in January; but it was not before October that 
the rulers of France brought their next chief victim out of her cage, 
and feasted the people's eyes with her trial and execution. Those 
cat-eyed people are generally stealthy of foot, and awake when 
honester people are sleeping ; and so it was that one morning at three 
o'clock the queen was removed to another prison. She was brought 
to her trial (was it not a mock one ? ) on the 14th of October, before 
the notorious Fouquier Tinville, and was arraigned as " the Widow 
Capet." We are glad to be told that the queen showed herself a 
true woman in this dreadful hour; and what better could she he? 

Her accusers, of course, said what they could against her, and 
much more than they truthfully could ; and of course, she was con- 
demned to death. Could anything else have come of such a judge 
and such a jury ? Impossible, when they began by assuming that 
it was a crime to be a queen at all. Deliver us, O Lord, from such 
a justice-room as that of Tinville and his creatures ! Surely, the tender 
mercies of the wicked are cruel. 

It was on Monday when the " once brightest of queens, now defaced 
and forsaken," stood at Tinville's bar; and one can still read in the 
Bulletin of the Revolutionary tribunal the " trial of the Widow Capet." 

The witnesses came forward, one after another, and delivered their 
testimony ; and the accused lady answered, when necessary, with calm- 
ness and dignity. After she was sentenced to death, which took place 
at four o'clock in the morning, she was asked whether she had any- 
thing to say. She replied by shaking her head. A little while after 
the trial was ended, the city was astir to feast its cruel eyes on the 
death agony of Marie Antoinette. 

At sunrise the troops were drawn up, the cannon pointed in the 
proper direction, and every other preparation made, by the rulers of 
France, against any possibility of a rescue ; and at eleven o'clock 
the queen was brought out of her dismal prison, and placed in a cart 



148 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

with her hands bound behind her. She was dressed in white. She 
had already cut off her long hair, which had become as white as snow. 
A priest, dressed as much like a' layman as possible, went with her; but 
it was noticed that she spoke very little to him. Cries of " Vive la 
Republique ! " arose all along the way ; but the queen seemed to pay 
very small attentio,n to them. When she was carried past the Tui- 
leries, those who observed her face the most carefully saw a change 
in it. She was thinking of her husband and her children, and of 
what had been, and of what might have been had better counsels 
been taken. The queen reached the Place de la Revolution a little 
after twelve o'clock, and she mounted the scaffold with the courao-e 
of her race. The axe fell, Marie Antoinette was dead, and wild cries 
of " Vive la Republique ! " arose from the infatuated mob which 
crowded the place. 



CHAPTER XXIL 

EGALITE ORLEANS. 

OUR young readers will not remember Louis Philippe, except it 
may be from some picture or book which they may happen to 
have ; but he was the king of the French before the reign of the late 
Emperor Napoleon, and he was driven from his throne (never an easy 
one) by a revolution which happened in 1848. When he could no 
longer live safely in France, he went to England and there ended his 
days. He was the son of a royal duke, the Duke of Orleans, who 
lived during the times of the Revolution, and who, though a royal 
duke, was, or pretended to be, a lover of all the great changes which 
then took place. The name of the " Revolution Duke " was Louis 
Philippe Joseph. He was born in 1747, and was known, during his 
father's lifetime, as the Due de Chartres. He was a handsome man, 
and clever, but he was not a good man. It was his bad life which 
made the king and queen unwilling to have him at their court, and it 
was their dislike of him which made him hate them, and cast in his 
lot with their deadly enemies. The duke had an immense fortune, — 
it is said he had ^300,000 a year, — and this corrupted him, and made 
him nothing better than a mere lover of amusement. He did try to 
be a sailor at one time ; but his courage seems to have oozed out of 
his fingers' ends in a battle at Ushant, when some say he hid himself 
in the cabin, and was laughed at as a man who did not like cannon- 
balls. He was very fond of driving a coach-and-four, and he loved 
racehorses, and gave great sums to English jockeys to mount them. 
But even his great income was not able to pay all he owed, and he 



I50 



STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 



had to sell the Palais Royal gardens to raise money for his creditors. 
Very early in the Revolution he showed that he was against the king, 
and on one occasion, when he had opposed the wish of his Majesty, he 
was sent away to a sort of easy kind of prison ; but not for a long 
time. Louis was tender-hearted, and soon set his cousin at liberty; 
and the duke came out of- bonds again, but with no kinder feelings 
toward his king. 

When the States-General made their first procession at Versailles, 
it was noticed by many that the Duke of Orleans stepped before those 
of his own rank and tried to appear as one of the Commons, and for 
this feat he was rewarded with cheers; and when the Clergy and 
some of the Nobles joined the Commons, the duke was among them ; 
and as soon as there was a left side, or party, in the Assembly favor- 
able to the greatest changes, there the duke sat, as though he were 
one of them. 

In the insurrection of women, when the king was insulted in his 
own house, and afterward brought a sort of prisoner to Paris, where 
was his blood relation, the Duke of Orleans ? He was still making 
himself, by many grand promises, the idol of the people, in order that 
if Louis were dethroned he might be put in his place. People in 
England soon saw through the duke, and despised him ; when they 
fully knew what he was up to, they shunned him as if he had the 
plague. A famous authoress, named Hannah More, saw him in Vaux- 
hall Gardens, when nobody would speak to him or notice him in any 
way. 

When the duke's money was all spent, he became the more anxious 
to play his cards well, so as to climb into power ; and he thought he 
could not do better than sit among the thirty members on the left, and 
go as far in the Revolution as any of them. But it was plainly to be 
seen what he was after. When the debates were going on about the 
regency, he was observed anxiously walking up and down the passages 
of the Parliament House ; but his hopes were doomed to be crushed, 



EGALITE ORLEANS. 151 

and no man pitied him, for he was loved by none. When he was 
disappointed, he seemed disposed to be sorry for the king's misfor- 
tunes ; and one Sunday he went to a court levee, having sent word 
beforehand that he was far from being the king's enemy, as it was 
commonly said of him. At this levee, however, the duke was shame- 
fully treated, for the courtiers flocked round him and elbowed him to 
the door ; and when he retired to another room, where a table was 
laid with silver dishes and such-like, voices were heard saying, " Take 
care of the plate ! " as if the duke were a common burglar. On that 
occasion he never got within sight or speaking range of the royal 
family ; and when he was fairly driven down the staircase to the outer 
door, some of the courtly group actually spat on his head. All this 
ungentlemanly treatment was unknown to the king at the time, and 
when he heard about it afterward he was greatly offended. But the 
Duke of Orleans attributed it to him, and he hated him from that day 
forth with a deeper hatred than ever. 

When the National Convention was chosen, the duke was one of 
the sixty members of the former Parliament who were elected. As 
now all ranks and titles were swept away, the duke was no longer a 
duke, and he therefore asked his Paris electors to give him a new 
name worthy of the glorious age they lived in. One of them there- 
fore suggested the name Egalite, — that is. Equality, — and the duke 
thenceforth sat among his friends as Philippe Egalite. But in spite of 
all his loud professions, and all he had given up for the Republic, 
Philippe Egalite was never trusted by the stern men with whom he 
sat and voted. These men always suspected him as a dangerous 
" mingle-mangle " of royalty and republic. His face, they say, grew 
more and more gloomy, as though he knew he were treading on a 
very uncertain path, which might lead him any day to the guillotine. 

When the great hour came for deciding how the king was to be 
dealt with, and some were for banishment and some for death, Philippe 
mounted the tribune and spoke his word of fate thus : *' In my soul and 



152 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

conscience I vote for death." At the sound of his voice a groan 
and a shudder ran through the hall. Philippe hit his mark; he 
helped to slay his kinsman, but in killing him he destroyed himself. 
When the other vote had to be taken, " Shall there be delay or not 
in the king's death ? " here again the unnatural kinsman voted, " No 
delay ! " and the next one who voted, to show his disgust, said, as he 
mounted the tribune, " Since Philippe says no, I, for my part, say 
yes. 

When Louis was put to death on Monday, January 21, in the 
Place de la Revolution, Philippe Egalite was near the scaffold. He 
sat in his cabriolet by the guillotine, and when the last act in that sad 
drama was over the wretched duke drove away. On the 6th of April 
that same year, as he was sitting at the whist-table in his palace, 
he was " wanted " by the Convention. One of their bailiffs came for 
him, and he was obliged to go. He was examined, and found guilty 
of crimes against the Revolution ; and he was sent to the Castle of If, 
near Marseilles ; and his " Palace Egalite," once known as the Palais 
Royal, became the Palais National. 

Nearly seven months afterward he was brought to Paris, and 
found guilty of " Royalism " and other crimes. In the mind of many 
he was guilty because he had voted in his soul and conscience for the 
king's death. On the 3d of November he reached Paris, and on the 
6th he was doomed to die at once. After he heard the sentence he 
partook of a very good breakfast, and then awaited his terrible fate 
with great coolness. He was carried to the place of execution, 
dressed with uncommon elegance ; but he found none to pity him in 
all that great crowd through which he went. Every mouth, rather, 
was opened to pour out its cursing and bitterness; and as he went 
by his once elegant home, the people took hold of the horses' heads, 
and made the death-cart stop awhile, that the duke might see it and 
be pained by its changed appearance. There, in great letters (each 
blue, white, and red), he could read these words : " Republic, one and 




THE DUKE OF ORLEANS GOING TO EXECUTION. 



EGALITE ORLEANS. 1 55 

indivisible ; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death. This is National 
Property." 

Looking on his old home thus given up to the people whom he 
hated, Egalite died ; and with much coolness and unconcern, for he 
was a brave man, and might, perhaps, have been a great one had 
he been differently placed. But by foolishly and wickedly pandering 
to a furious mob, he earned (as all who do so will) their deadly con- 
tempt ; and they were right so far in despising him, for he was a 
double-faced man, — and as such, a man to be despised, though not 
to be visited with the extreme penalty of the law. 



CHAPTER XXIIl. 

THE OVERTHROW OF RELIGION. 

HOW did the Christian religion fare in all these unquiet times? 
It fared very badly, — that is, the outer show of it ; for, it must 
be confessed, the ministers of religion were, when the Revolution 
began, not what they should have been. Had . they been so, the 
Revolution would never have taken place at all. 

It. was thought by many good Republicans that the French Revolu- 
tion was really a great effort to realize the Christian religion. Its three 
watchwords, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, look very fair and 
sweet to the eye ; and no doubt many simple-minded Frenchmen, who 
were disgusted with the hollow shell of Christianity which was offered 
them as the highest possible form of religion, did hope that the Revo- 
lution would bring not only plenty of bread, but a pure faith also. Bb,t, 
alas for their hopes ! how sorely they were disappointed ! On every 
burial-ground it was ordained that these words should be inscribed : 
" Here is eternal sleep." 

No ; the temper of the French people was not favorable to the 
old forms and practices of religion, and in the month of November, 
1793, the," Feast of Reason " was appointed in the place of the old 
Christian feasts of Easter and Christmas. There was to be henceforth 
no religion but liberty, and the only God to be worshipped was " The 
People." 

Then began the curious and painful scenes of churches losing their 
bells, which were cast into the melting-pots to come out fused metal 
for the moulds of cannon ; and those old melodious bells, made in 



THE OVERTHROW OF RELIGION. 157 

happier times to chime their sweetest on holy days, and to call people 
to the mercy-seat of Our Father, were now forced to assume a new 
shape, and send forth volleys of deadly missiles. The sacred cups and 
patens, if of silver, were trundled away to the Mint to become pieces of 
money ; and where the church had only pewter vessels, they were 
melted and cast into bullets to slay the enemies of France. 

The vestries, once full of richly embroidered garments, were left 
naked and empty. Surplices became shirts, and costly copes were 
transformed into coats or trousers. The service-books were made 
into wadding for muskets, and even the graves were broken open 
for the sake of the lead of which the coffins were made. 

The sepulchre of a long line of kings was called St. Denis. This 
name was not pleasing to the men in power, and it was changed into 
the name of " Franciade." What cared a red-capped Republican for 
St. Denis } 

So in the winter months of 1793 one might see strange sights 
in Paris and in other French cities, — drunken men riding on asses, 
a chalice full of brandy in one hand and a paten with some tid-bit on 
it in the other. The ass, perhaps, would have, as a bit in his jaws, 
*fhe black or coloreid silk stole of a priest. A long line of such un- 
seemly rioters, with an immense quantity of church furniture carried 
on the backs of asses and in wheelbarrows, went to the hall of the Con- 
vention, and stood there to receive an ovation, as if they had been en- 
gaged in the most praiseworthy work possible. Some witty fellow had 
written a suitable poem, which was sung; and the chorus was joined in 
by drunken revellers, who brandished cross and crucifix and swung 
censers about. Some of the members, Danton especially, were very 
angry at this wicked spectacle, which was indeed enough to bring the 
Convention into contempt in the judgment of mankind ; but the greater 
part of those foolish law-makers seem to have applauded these goings on, 
and to have permitted the drunken rufiians to dance the carmagnole in 
the hall ; nay, some of the more advanced Republicans, rejoicing in the 



158 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

complete overthrow of the Christian religion (in their eyes a mere 
sham), came out of their seats and danced with the girls, many of 
whom were attired in priests' vestments. To such a pass had the 
French come in the November. of 1793. But when we remember how 
the old cathedrals in England were treated by the rude soldiers of 
Oliver Cromwell, we shall be more slow to condemn the French, w^ho 
were for a time drunk with the new wine of their liberty, and hardly 
knew what they were doing. The English soldiers w-ere trained, 
indeed, to hate with a deadly hatred all the " rags of popery," as they 
called the decent ornaments of the clergy, and the sweet-voiced organs, 
and the church ornaments, and painted windows ; but they never de- 
throned God, nor set up a miserable opera-singer in his place as the 
French did. To such a fool's pass did those miserable men come 
under the guiding hand of a wretched creature who went by the 
loudly sounding name of Anaxagoras Chaumette. This man had 
been a sailor in his youthful days, and he was now a great man, or 
thought so. Anyhow he was a ready speaker, and he had plenty of 
boldness and a fair supply of wit ; but his long curly hair covered a 
rather vain and empty head. 

It was Chaumette who conceived the brilliant notion of a Feast of 
Reason, and a goddess to match it. A goddess, — yes, none less than 
a dancer at the opera, named Candeille, who, when well painted and 
dressed in sky blue, with a garland of oak leaves on her head, w^as 
carried first into the hall of the' Convention, and afterward into the 
Cathedral of Our Lady, when she was seated (where does the readei 
imagine.?) on the high altar itself! 

This theatre goddess was accompanied to the cathedral by many 
grave and reverend senators, a number of select citizens dressed as 
Romans, bands of music, and a vast multitude wearing the red night- 
cap ; and a hymn to Liberty, having been written by a poet, was duly 
sung. Anaxagoras Chaumette must have felt himself a great man 
that day ; for he had made a religion, and a goddess to boot. It was a 




THE OVERTHROW OF RELIGION. 



THE OVERTHROW OF RELIGION. l6l 

grand stroke of business for that curly-headed sailor; but we cannot 
help thinking he would have been happier and more useful had he 
stuck to his ship, and left gods and goddesses alone. When he brought 
the sky-blue dancer into the aisle of Notre Dame, how little he thought 
he would soon have to meet the God whom he had insulted ! 

We will not dwell any longer on these painful pictures of blas- 
phemy, profanity, and robbery, which were seen in all parts of France, 
until almost every house of prayer was stripped and desolate, and the 
people were left without a religion except those dry bones of a miser- 
able sham called the Feast of Reason. This was the poor man's 
festival, and an opera-dancer was his deity! Verily, the Revolution 
was not lucky in its religion ; that, at least, must be admitted by 
every candid mind. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

ARREST OF DANTON. 

WE have seen the Girondins, those true children of the Revolu- 
tion, thrust out of the Convention, and then put under arrest ; 
we have seen some of them flying disguised over France, and others, 
who could not escape, brought before the judgment-seat of Fouquier 
Tinville, and sentenced to a speedy death. It is strange to think that 
Barbaroux, the handsome and eloquent Republican, who sent for the 
six hundred Marseillese, had at last to shoot himself to avoid falling, 
as he feared, into the hands of the pitiless Jacobins. It is also strange 
to think that Petion, once the almost adored Mayor of Paris, should 
have to fly from the more advanced Republicans, and should die in a 
cornfield and be found half eaten by dogs. But so it was. The Giron- 
dins helped to raise a spirit which neither they nor any one else could 
control. They gave life to a power which turned upon them and rent 
them in pieces. As one of them said: "The Revolution, like Saturn,, 
devoured its own children." 

But the devouring appetite of the Revolution did not stop at the 
Girondins. Far from it. The Committee of Public Safety, formed 
of nine leading members, was soon supreme ; and as it had men in it 
like Robespierre and the cruel Billaud (who looked on with satisfaction 
at the September massacres), we are not surprised to see men dragged 
down to the axe who ought to have been safe enough, — men such as 
Danton and Camille Desmoulins, who had, more than any others, 
helped on the Revolution from the very first. It was Danton himself 
who proposed that all power should be given to the Committee of 



ARREST OF DANTON. iSz 

Public Safety, and that it should have a very large sum of money at 
its command. But Danton would not sit in the Committee himself, 
though they requested him to do so many times. He grumbled loudly 
at the shameful way the people went on in the churches, for he felt it 
would bring the Revolution into discredit, as no doubt it did. Other 
things, too, did not please Danton. He saw that the members of the 
Convention were becoming afraid, many of them at least, to speak their 
minds. One of them, named Chabot, talked of forming an opposition, 
and in another week he was in prison. For any member could get on 
his legs and propose the impeachment of any other member; and if 
the proposition was carried, the accused member was swiftly arrested, 
brought before Tinville and his jurymen, and carted off to the guillo- 
tine. It was a fearful time, especially for those who meddled with 
government ; and it was well called the " Reign of Terror," for nobody 
seems to have known whether or not his head would remain on his 
shoulders from one week's end to another. 

The generals, too, of the Revolutionary armies had no very pleas- 
ant time of it. If a general did not win a victory, he was sent for, and 
had to stand a searching examination. One general, named Hou- 
chard, was guillotined because he stood behind a hedge during a bat- 
tle. Every officer felt that he must go forward and storm the enemy's 
position ; for if he did not do his best, and rnore than his best, he knew 
he would have to lose his head at Paris. It was now that several 
famous men started up from the ranks and led French armies to vic- 
tory. We may mention Jourdan, Pichegru, and Hoche, among others. 
There were not less than fourteen armies who kept the numerous ene- 
mies at bay; and those armies were made up of clever French lads, 
who were soon drilled into the finest soldiers ever seen. France has 
never shown herself 2:reater or so grreat as when at this time she rose 
up, one nation against many, and hurled back her enemies on every 
side. That, at least, was a sublime sight ; and however much we may 
mourn over the sorrow and terror caused by the Revolution, we can- 



1 64 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

not help admiring; the dauntless bravery of those boys who, often with- 
out shoes and almost always in rags, swept away the pipe-clayed 
soldiers of Prussia with their shouts of Ca ira! 

We might fill page after page with the horrors which were perpe- 
trated in the unhappy country districts of France. We might tell our 
readers more about the headsman at Nantes, who was worn out with 
guillotine work ; of ninety priests sunk at one time in a flat-bottomed 
boat in the Loire ; of women and children, by the five hundred, shot 
down in La Vendee ; of men and women tied together and flung into 
the river, which tying together was called in jest a " republican mar- 
riage." It was a fine time for the ravens and wolves : they had many 
a feast on human flesh. Mothers had sometimes to stand by the guil- 
lotine and see their children executed, and the innocents were often 
thrown into the cold, dark river after their mothers ; and when the 
murderers were asked to spare the little ones, they answered, " These 
children are wolflings, who will grow, if they live, to be wolves." 

The Committee of Public Safety consisted, as we have said, of 
nine members ; and, by Danton's decree, it was made all powerful, — 
yea, powerful enough to drag him down, though he was the giant of 
the Revolution. 

On the 15th of March, 1794, a batch of the most advanced men 
were suddenly arrested and brought to trial. Among them was the 
church-robber Chaumette, and others whom the stronger party sus- 
pected. Every one was now suspected in turn, and it was a question. 
Who could eat the other ? Danton was not a bloodthirsty man like 
some of them, nor a selfish man. He had often been heard to say, 
" Let Danton's name be blighted, so long as France is free." And he 
had also said, when he saw the quarrels and disputes among the Revo- 
lutionary leaders, " Peace ! oh, peace with one another ! Are we not 
alone against the world, — a little band of brothers ? " 

In the same March Danton left Paris for a few days. He was, 
perhaps, unwise to do so. He visited his birthplace, Arcis-on-the- 




" DANTON, NO WEAKNESS ! " 



ARREST OF D ANTON. 167 

Aube, and enjoyed, as far as he could, a few peaceful days ; but he 
was soon sent for, and had to return from the sweet murmur of the 
stream and the fresh green fields to measure his strength with Robe- 
spierre, and to fail in the attempt. 

When he returned to his place in the Convention, he said, " We 
ought to put down the Royalists, but we should not confound the 
innocent with the guilty." 

" And who told you," said Robespierre, " that one innocent person 
ever has perished } " 

" Not one innocent person ? " replied Danton ; " what do you say, 
friend Paris ? " Here he turned to a man who, as a juryman, had had 
much to do with the trials and condemnations. What friend Paris 
answered we do not know, but he must have felt qualms of conscience. 

Danton was advised to get into the Tribune and crush Robe- 
spierre, as he easily might have done. He was warned that if he did 
not put down that man, that man would put him down. But he was 
not of a suspicious temper, and he thought, as he had done so very 
much for the Revolution, his life would be safe. When his friends 
advised him to fly, he said he would not. " If I am cast out from 
France," said he, "there is nothing for me^in other lands but a prison. 
I would rather stay where I am." Even on the night of March 30, 
when his friend Paris came in and told him that his arrest had been 
made out in the Committee of Public Safety, he would not stir. " They 
dare not arrest me," he said ; and he went to bed as if nothing had 
happened. 

Early next morning it was rumored over Paris that Danton and 
several others had been arrested. " Who, then," asked every one, " is 
safe } " Danton, when he heard it, said that he had a year ago created 
that same Committee of Public Safety, and had armed it with supreme 
power ; but he now saw his mistake, and asked God and man to par- 
don him for what he had done. " They are all brothers Cain," said 
he, "and not one of them understands anything about government." 



1 68 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

When he was brought before Tinville, and asked what was his 
name he answered, " My name is Danton, a name tolerably well known 
in the Revolution ; and my abode will soon be annihilation." The 
trial oif Danton was the hardest task Tinville had ever had, and unless 
the Committee of Public Safety had passed a new decree he would 
never have been condemned; but the decree was passed, and Danton, 
by law, was condemned to die. He died, as he had lived, a true man ! 
His courage was nearly giving way, as he thought of his dear wife 
left weeping behind ; but he soon remembered who he was, and he en- 
couraged himself to die bravely, by saying, " Danton, no weakness ! " 

Just before he died he said to Samson the executioner, " Show my 
head to the people ; it is worth showing." With him died several 
other leading men, including Camille Desmoulins, the editor ; and we 
can but say here, as we said once before, that the Revolution was now, 
like Saturn, eating her own children. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE. 

MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE has left behind him a name 
which is as detestable as any in history, " He was a man," 
said Condorcet, " without an idea in his head or a feeling in his 
heart." And yet he rose to be the first man, for a time, in France. 
He was the son of an advocate at Arras, and a school-fellow with the 
brilliant Camille Desmoulins. When he became a member of the 
States-General, he was about thirty years of age ; he wore spectacles, 
and his complexion was of a bilious hue. He soon attracted the 
notice of Mirabeau, who thought " he would do something, because he 
believed every word he spoke." 

When the Jacobin Club used to meet in its early days, Robes- 
pierre was always present ; and when there were but thirty members 
seated on the extreme left in the National Assembly, he was one of 
them, and not ashamed of his opinions. In 1791 he was elected Pub- 
lic Accuser in the new courts of justice. Brave he never was, for he 
used to disappear at the times when there was a crisis, such as that of 
the 9th of August, 1792. When the belfries were sounding at mid- 
night, and all the people were getting ready, and the six hundred 
Marseillese were leading the way to the Tuileries, Robespierre hid 
himself, and he did not come out of his den until the king was put 
under lock and key, and so rendered powerless. 

But this want of pluck does not seem to have lessened Robes- 
pierre's influence with the Jacobins. That powerful club met in the 
nave of the Jacobins' Church, which was seated up to the very roof. 



I70 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

The tribune, where the speakers stood when speaking, was raised 
about half-way between the pavement and the roof. The chief 
speaker in this remarkable assemblage was Robespierre ; he was the 
Jacobins' petted child, and they would listen, hour after hour, to his 
long-winded ojations. 

When the September massacres were over, and a thousand and 
eighty-nine lay dead, and the carters carted the stripped human bodies 
away at so much per journey to the burying-grounds, Robespierre 
nearly wept when he heard it said that there was one innocent person 
among the slain. The Girondins, who saw the dangerous principles 
of Marat and Robespierre, rose up and denounced them ; and both 
were in some peril, but escaped it. 

One day Robespierre was in the tribune and said, " Is there any 
one here that dare accuse me of aspiring to be a dictator } " 

" Yes," replied Louvet, starting up and taking some papers from 
his pocket ; " I accuse thee, Robespierre, — I, Jean Baptiste Louvet." 

" Speak, Robespierre ! " shouted Danton ; " speak in thine own 
defence." 

But the accused, turning pale, did not answer a word. And 
Louvet went on with his papers, reciting one crime after another, — 
how he bullied at elections, had a retinue of mob soldiers, wished to 
be a dictator, had his hands stained with the blood of innocent victims 
in the September massacres, and so on. 

The whole Convention was in an uproar, and never, it is said, did 
Robespierre stand in such peril ; but the Convention, eager for pub- 
lic matters, dismissed the affair as a mere personal quarrel between 
Robespierre and Louvet. 

In the great trial of the king, Robespierre, of course, both spoke 
and voted for his death. When the French lawyers were endeavoring 
to prove the trial lawful, Robespierre said, " What is the use of talk- 
ing about the law? Here might is right." 

Danton, as we have seen, had moved that all power should be given 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE. 



171 



to the Committee of Public Safety, though he afterward asked pardon 
of God and man for thus putting such a fearful weapon into the hands 
of nine men who were " all brothers Cain." 

Robespierre was, of course, one of those nine ; and he hoped by 
means of his own adroitness to remove all his rivals from his path, and 
to become by and by a sort of French Cromwell. His wishes had 
become a law by the end of 1793, and he now conceived himself 
strong enough to pluck down Danton, the only one of whom he was 
afraid. 

About the beginning of April, 1 794, the great Danton and several 
of his supporters were put to death. Among them was the brilliant 
writer Camille Desmoulins, a bosom friend of Danton. These two 
died in the prime of life, one being thirty-four, and the other a year 
older. Camille's widow followed him on the loth of April, and many 
others. Terrible now was Robespierre, the leading spirit of the Com- 
mittee of Public Safety ; and many were the heads which now fell into 
the sack. Among them we may notice that of the once honored 
Madame Elizabeth, the sister of Louis. Only two members of the 
royal family now remained, — a boy and a girl. The unfortunate boy 
was taken away from Marie Antoinette while she was alive, and 
handed over to the tender mercies of a cordwainer, named Simon, 
who taught the lad to be as rough as himself. 

When Simon became a member of the Municipal Council, the 
boy hid himself in the Temple Prison and was utterly neglected. He 
very nearly perished of hunger, and had to wear his shirt for six 
months without washing or changing it. 

Robespierre was anxious to have some sort of religion for the 
Republic ; and as the old faith was destroyed and the worship of 
Reason set on one side, he invented a religion, with the help of his 
friends, for poor France. On a bright June day, in 1794, the Tuil- 
eries garden was crowded with people in their best clothes, and Robes- 
pierre, having made the Convention pass some decrees about 3^ 



172 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, came forth at their 
head, dressed in a sky-blue coat, white waistcoat embroidered with 
silver, and black silk breeches. David, the painter, had prepared some 
hideous pasteboard figures of Atheism and Anarchy ; and when Robes- 
pierre had made a speech, the painter handed him a lighted torch, 
wherewith he set fire to the figures and burned them to ashes. Then 
there arose by aid of machinery a statue of Wisdom, which got rather 
scorched by^ the flame. 

It seems that Robespierre was rather laughed at by the shrewd 
French people for the part he had taken in this silly affair, and he 
was sulky for some time afterward. There was a statesman named 
Tallien, who had been suspected, and recalled from Bordeaux. At 
this man Robespierre had launched threats from the tribune. There 
were many others, also, who believed that they were soon to be marked 
out for slaughter. It was said that there were forty, at least, who were 
to be struck down at a blow, and then Robespierre was to be made a 
dictator, and be in reality the sovereign of France. 

At a dinner-party near Paris, on a very hot day in July, the guests 
took off their coats, and left them in the drawing-room. One of them, 
named Carnot, requiring some paper, groped in Robespierre's pocket, 
and found a list of forty names, his own being among them. Of 
course he did not go back to the company, but made his way at once 
into a place of safety. 

On the 26th of July -Robespierre mounted the tribune, and spoke 
of the bad state of Republican spirit, and of the need of new vigor to 
be given to the guillotine. The speech fell flat, and the usually obse- 
quious Convention was mutinous. He felt that the hour was now 
come when either he must put the Convention down, or it must put 
him down. He went that same night to the Jacobins, and told them 
how he had been treated ; and they shouted out that their Robespierre 
should not die, but there should be another insurrection, and the Con- 
vention should be cleared of all who did not obey Robespierre. 




ROBESPIEI^E TRYING TO KILL HIMSELF. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE. 1 75 

On the morrow, as Saint Just, one of Robespierre's creatures, was 
reading a report, Tallien entered and interrupted him. He said, " If 
this Convention dares not strike the tyrant, I will ; and with this will 
I do it ! " At these words he drew out a dagger. 

Then ensued a fearful scene. Robespierre tried again and again 
to speak, but he could not get a hearing for the noise. He turned 
and appealed to each party, but none would pay the least attention 
now to his words. 

" The blood of Danton chokes him," they said. 

He was decreed accused, and his brother also, and Saint Just, and 
other friends of his ; and they were packed off to prison. But they 
were rescued by some National Guards whom Henriot the com- 
mander had corrupted, and things looked very doubtful for some time. 
The Convention, however, declared them outlaws, and made Barras 
general of such troops as they could get together. 

There was nearly a battle between Henriot's men and those of 
Barras, and there would have been, had not the Convention's decree 
been read aloud : " Robespierre and all rebels are declared out of law." 
Then the soldiers all forsook Henriot, and joined Barras. 

The wretched Robespierre and his company were now come to 
their death, and they knew it. Henriot flung himself out of the win- 
dow, and lodged in a cesspool, whence he was taken out half dead. 
Augustine Robespierre followed Henriot ; Couthon tried to kill him- 
self ; Saint Just called on Lebas to kill him ; Robespierre tried to blow 
out his brains, but failed, breaking his lower jaw instead. They were 
all tried, and condemned to death, and were guillotined that same 
afternoon in the Place de la Revolution ; and with their execution 
what was called the Reign of Terror came to an end. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

THE DAY OF THE SECTIONS. 

SUCH is the name given to the 5th of October, 1795, the last day 
of the Revolution, and the first day of Napoleon's real power. 
Robespierre fell, as we have seen, in July, 1794, and after his fall every 
one seemed to breathe more easily. The word " mercy " was once more 
heard in France. The Convention became supreme again, and free 
discussion went on, and the prisons were opened, and the suspects set 
free ; the Jacobin club-room was locked up, and its key laid on the 
table of the Convention ; the key was given up again, but the glory 
of the Jacobins was over. The moderate men rose in favor every day. 
Paris became again a joyous city, a city of song and dance ; and the 
ruffianism of St. Antoine was kept in check by young fellows of the 
respectable classes, who formed themselves into well-drilled bands, and 
carried clubs loaded with lead. They used to say, " We have suffered 
enough, our friends have been guillotined : down with these cursed 
Jacobins ! " — or, sometimes, " Jacoquins " {coquin being the word for 
" rascal " ). On the 29th of November, 1 794, these armed dandies of 
Paris attacked the Jacobin club-room, and smashed the windows. This 
led to a scrimmage outside, where the Jacobin members had the worst 
of it, and the troops were obliged to interfere, after which this once 
mighty club was finally closed as a nuisance. 

But the Paris mob looked upon all these revivals of genteel life 
with the greatest dislike. The bakers' queues were still as long as 
ever they were, bread was very dear, trade was slack, and on the ist 
of April, 1795, St. Antoine rose again, and flowed in a solid mass 



THE DAY OF THE SECTIONS. 1 77 

toward the Tuileries, shouting out, " Bread ! bread ! " The Convention 
was sitting when the great sea of people flowed like an irresistible tide 
into the hall ; but, the alarm having been sounded, they were swept 
out again by some National Guards, assisted by the young volunteer 
gentry, who did not use their clubs loaded with lead, but actual 
bayonets. 

In this year Fouquier Tinville, who had sent so many to a bloody 
death, was himself guillotined, and sixteen of his jurymen with him. 
They all pleaded hard for their lives, saying they had acted by order 
of the Committee of Public Safety. At Lyons great conflicts went 
on between the moderate men and the Jacobins. Sixty of the latter 
were burned to death, or stifled by smoke ; and the Jacobins in other 
places avenged their Lyons brethren by killing or maiming those who 
were opposed to them. ^ 

At Paris, too, the old cry was again raised among the leaders of the 
mob, " To arms ! to arms ! " and the old scenes were enacted. Crowds 
armed with pikes and muskets filled the galleries and hall of the 
National Convention. Women were there, by the thousand, clamor- 
ing for bread ; and the husbands, hearing that the Convention was 
assassinating their wives and daughters, burst open the doors and 
seized hold of Deputy Feraud, who was endeavoring to shield the 
President from injury. They trampled him under their feet, and 
dragged him nearly dead into the lobby, and then beheaded him ; and 
once more this wild city saw its favorite sight of a bleeding head and 
a deathly face uplifted on a pike's point, and making the circuit of 
the principal streets. The bulk of the mob still remained in the 
Convention hall, its leaders insisting on this and that decree being 
passed at once ; but the President, Boissy d'Anglas, would not yield, — 
no, not for a moment, though the wretches levelled muskets at him, 
and shook Feraud's gory head in his face. It was a frightful din, — 
men shouting, drums beaten, honorable members escaping when they 
could ; no order, no law possible. 

12 



178 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

At four o'clock about sixty members were left ; and they, in obedi- 
ence to mob law, chose a president ( for the real President had left the 
hall ), and passed a number of decrees of a highly revolutionary char- 
acter. While the people were thus triumphing over their success, 
and shouting out, " Decreed ! decreed!" with a roll of drum music, 
an officer entered, followed by a number of National Guards and 
young gentlemen with fixed bayonets. These, with measured tramp, 
very soon cleared the place, many of the mob throwing .open the win- 
dows and escaping that way. All the decrees that had been passed 
were declared null and void ; and thirteen of the sixty who had passed 
them were accused, but not at once arrested. They, in a day or two 
afterward, set up a new National Convention in the east of Paris, and 
also a rival force ; but the dashing sparks of Paris gentry proved too 
much for St. Antoine, and they cowed that noisy suburb and dis- 
armed it. The actual murderer of Feraud was captured and all but 
guillotined. He was rescued by the men of St. Antoine, and he 
hid himself in one of the courts of this populous suburb ; but hearing 
that St. Antoine was beaten and to be disarmed, he threw himself 
headlong from a lofty roof, and died miserably 

Of the thirteen members who passed the decrees, all perished by 
the guillotine except three. Ruhl shot himself through the head ; and 
Goujon, when he heard that he was sentenced, drew a knife, sheathed 
it in his breast, then handed it on to Romme, who did the same, and 
then quickly passed it to the next, who all but slew himself. 

The 5th of October in that year was a day of very great impor- 
tance to Europe, for it raised Napoleon Bonaparte out of obscurity 
into fame. That day saw him starting on his wonderful path of glory, 
and it also brought a certain amount of peace and order to the long- 
distracted city, though it was order brought about by the great sol- 
dier's sword. 

The Convention, wishing to end its labors, presented to the 
country a constitution. Many of its provisions irritated the Paris 




HOLDING UP THE HEAD OF FERAUD ON A PIKE. 



THE DAY OF THE SECTIONS. l8l 

Sections, who, sooner than accept it, massed their forty thousand 
fighting men to resist it. The Convention had also its regular 
troops, but not nearly so many ; and it had its officers, with Menou at 
the head. On the 4th of October the Convention ordered Menou to 
go and disarm the rebels ; he went, but returned without any success, 
and was thrown into prison as a traitor. The rebels were emboldened 
at Menou's ignominious failure, and the Convention was disheartened. 
What were they to do ? Some thought Barras was the man to disarm 
the rebels. Others, more to the purpose, bethought them of Bona- 
parte. The command was offered to him, and in half an hour it was 
accepted. And then the readiness and military talent of Bonaparte 
showed themselves. He at once sent off Murat at a gallop to secure 
the guns at the camp of Sablons. Murat arrived just in time to pre- 
vent them from falling into the other party's hands. Then the young 
general Napoleon made all his arrangements as only he could make 
them. " He drew a ring of steel discipline round the Tuileries, and 
saw that every gunner had his match burning," and that every sol- 
dier was on the alert. The 5th of October came, the anniversary of 
the insurrection of women, and the rebels of the Sections were 
counting on an easy victory over the Convention, and of making it 
bend to their wishes. 

The rebels seized the Church of St. Roch, and the Pont Neuf. 
The outposts of the Convention fell back, and every now and then a 
stray bullet struck the Tuileries, There was a wish on the part of the 
Sectioners to settle the matter without bloodshed, and many women 
were busy as peacemakers ; but Napoleon had his orders to repel the 
rebels by force, and he was not a man to shrink from the task. 

Four o'clock in the afternoon arrived, and the rebels, finding no 
response to their messages of peace, began the attack on the Conven- 
tion in earnest, upon which General Bonaparte ordered his great guns 
to be fired. In a few minutes two hundred of the rebels were blown 
to pieces, especially near the Church of St. Roch ; and the Section 



1 82 STORIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

soldiers, finding themselves exposed to such terrible discharges of 
grape, retired in all directions, and after a few more shells had been 
fired the whole affair was over. The Church of St. Roch shows to 
this day the marks of the cannon-balls. The Citizen Bonaparte, who 
had thus caused the Convention to triumph, was named by acclama- 
tion General of the Interior ; and Paris felt at last that she had met 
her match in him who may with truth be called the First Soldier of 
his own time- 



THE END. 



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